250839 - placeholder line: after pagedown show horizontal line at old bottom of page for a few seconds

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Benjamin Segal]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.8

Many people lose their place while reading a large amount of text when they
press the down key.  A possible solution to this would be to make a horizontal
line appear temporarily that would fade away after a second or two that would
show the bottom of the previous scrolling position.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Go to large segment of text.
2.  Get to bottom of the window.
3.  Hit down key.

Actual Results:  
Lost place.

Expected Results:  
Make a horizontal line to show me my place.

This idea was sugested at http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=114082&cid=9663993

Comment 1

[Benjamin Segal]

Old extention was causing user-agent to display 0.8 when in reality it should be
0.9.2 not that it makes any diffence to this bug report.

Comment 2

[Andrew Hagen]

I like this idea. 

Confirming enhancement request.

Comment 3

[Ben Claar]

I think this is a great idea.  Shall we call it a "placeholder line" to give us
a common termonology?  Here's a few issues to discuss:

1. What color should the placeholder line be?  Should it depend on the
background color?  Be user configurable?  How thick?  How long should it stay
around?

2. This should be something that should be able to be disabled as a preference.
 Perhaps it should even be an extension rather than part of the core browser.

3. If implemented, it should obviously work for pressing page-up and page-down.
 But what about mouse-scrolling via middle click scroll or dragging the scroll
bar?  Or holding down an arrow such that a lot of text quickly scrolls off the
screen?  Or horizontal scrolling?  Perhaps this bug should cover implementing a
placeholder line on page-up and page-down, and we could handle other instances
in a separate request.  Just food for thought :-)

Comment 4

[Benjamin Segal]

IMHO I think the line should be a darker variation of whatever the color of the
background is.  So if the background were white the line would be grey.  The
only issue would be sites with a black background but that could just be light
grey or something for that spacific case.  I would also think that the line
should be thin to make it so that it wouldn't block where one is trying to read,
thus defeating the purpose of the feature.  As for other kinds of scrolling I
think it would be a good idea to make it so when the down arrows are clicked on
the scroll bar the line appears.   Also when the middle mouse botton is moved. 
I don't think it would work very well when clicking the middle mouse botton
though.  Just my opinions.

Comment 5

[u88484]

I think it should be about 7 or 8px, transparent, dotted, grey line.

Comment 6

[u88484]

so any word on this feature? I think it would be a great new feature for 1.0

Comment 7

[Blake Ross]

Only the Firefox team may plus bugs as blockers for 1.0.

Comment 8

[slice1900]

I just had an idea like this as I was frustrated once again by having to hunt
for my place in some text after hitting spacebar to page down.  My idea was to
have a triangular arrow float in the left side at the previous margin, perhaps
pulsing with a change in color or intensity for a few seconds before
disappearing so it is easily seen.  I don't think a line across the whole page
is really needed since when you attempt to find your place you will naturally
look to the left side of the page (of course for right to left languages the
arrow will need to be on the other side and point the other direction I suppose!)

To my knowledge, no other browser has something like this, so it would be a
unique feature for Mozilla/Firefox.  There are some people who complain that
Mozilla merely implements features copied from other browsers, like tabs, popup
blockers, etc. so the more original stuff the Mozilla team implements the less
that criticism can be made.