277691 - Collection of Tabs bookmark Names ignored in creating tab labels when web pages are untitled

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Kent Paul Dolan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041220
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041220

I bookmarked a set of isolated frames from King Features Syndicate.
Being frames, they had no titles. I then saved them in tab sets of
ten. When I used the tab sets, the tab labels were the URLs, which
wasn't helpful, since only the (identical) beginnings were visible.
I went into "Manage Bookmarks" and changed the name of each tab to
the name of the comic strip. I expected, when I next used the tab
collection bookmarks, to see the tabs now labeled with the comic
strip names, but instead, the URLs were still being used to label
the tabs.

This is _not_ the case for web pages which have titles, so my guess
is that the rendering code is checking for a title, finding none,
and just automatically using the URL as a tab label, rather than
using the tab bookmark _Name_ as a tab label. Since the bookmark
Name, and the bookmark Location, are by default the same for web
pages that are untitled, this was an easy thing to overlook.

Since creating those tab sets was a lot of work, I cut out that
part from my bookmark file, and saved it as the URL above. It
won't demonstrate the problem in that shape, but if the tester
imports the Folder_Group s from that file, into a Mozilla browser
bookmark file, the problem will be apparent.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a bunch of untitled web pages as tabs
2. Save the collection of tabs
3. Using Manage Bookmarks, change the Name of each tab from the URL
   of the page, to some meaningful name using "Properties" from the
   righthand Mouse Button Menu.
4. Close the "Manage Bookmarks" widget
5. Close the set of tabs, and re-open it using the newly created
   "collection of tabs" bookmark

Actual Results:  
Changes to tab bookmark Names were ineffective, tab labels
still showed URLs from the bookmark properties "Location" line.

Expected Results:  
Changes to the tab bookmark Names should have been reflected
in the tab labels.

Creating similar "collection of tabs" bookmarks for
the comics from Yahoo! News, whose comics pages are
titled with the comic name _was_ effective.

[The whole point of doing the King Features comics
tabs collection bookmarks from the frames instead of
from the whole pages is that my bookmarklet "zoom
images in" doesn't work from the loaded whole page.
However, if the frame is opened as a self standing
web page, that bookmarklet works fine, and I can
then read the (tiny, blurred) text in the comics
much more easily with 61 year old eyes.]

Comment 1

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Attachment: Example "collection of tabs" Folder_Group s that show bug when used as bookmarks

[It would make more sense if the initial bug report page
of Bugzilla included an "add attachment" feature, as the
person new to reporting bugs doesn't know that will later
be possible.]

[Thanks to whomever fixed the descriptions in the Bugzilla
"Component" widget to satisfy my earlier reports of user
unfriendliness in those descriptions.]

The attachment is the set of tab collection bookmarks I
discussed in the main comment, wrapped in the head and
tail lines of the bookmark file from which I cut and pasted
it. This is the same file as pointed to by the URL in the
original bug report, just put here to be easier for testers
to play with it.

Comment 2

[Kent Paul Dolan]

I incorrectly reported that this problem did not
exist for pages with titles. That is incorrect.
Changes to the automatically saved titles in the
Name widget of the collection of tabs individual tab
Properties are also ignored, only the Web page
title, unmidified, is used for a tab bookmark. This
is _really_ user hostile when all the titles start
out the same, as in "Yahoo! News - Ziggie", where
with a collection of tabs for a dozen comics, _all_
the tab labels read "Yahoo! N...".

Apparently the title directly from the from the web
page at load time, or the page URL for an untitled
page, is being used for tab labels in preference to
any user-specified name for the tab from the
bookmarks file.  This is arguable Not A Good Thing.

The current bug leaves the user helpless to fix the
label ambiguity problem by modifications to the Name
field in the bookmark Properties.

xanthian.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Tabs don't know anything about bookmarks.  The tab label is the page title or
the URI if the page has no title.  How the page was loaded in the tab (bookmark,
link click, drag and drop, typing the URI, etc) ir irrelevant.

Comment 4

[Kent Paul Dolan]

(In reply to comment #3)

> Tabs don't know anything about bookmarks.  The tab
> label is the page title or the URI if the page has
> no title.  How the page was loaded in the tab
> (bookmark, link click, drag and drop, typing the
> URI, etc) ir irrelevant.

That's a pretty horrible design choice, then, since
once you get past six or eight tabs in a window, all
the tab labels are, typically, identical, being
either the site's left end of title name for itself,
like "Yahoo! N" or the "http://" part of a URL, or
at best fairly useless, being a mix of the two. Only
a very few well designed web pages have the "high
differentiation value" part of the page name to the
left end of the page title.

I suggest the ability to name tabs from the
bookmarks file is an essential usability issue for
the "bookmark a collection of tabs" feature. Blindly
poking at identical tab labels isn't much fun, and
expecting the user to memorize the labels and the
order in which they occur is unrealistic.

Since the current implementation hides the useful
parts of the names, in some minor sense it
"destroys data", or at least throws away useful
information in favor of retaining useless
information instead.

FWIW

xanthian.

Comment 5

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Attachment: screenshot example of many tabs, identical labels problem

Here's a screenshot of a completely predictable use
of a bookmarked collection of tabs, to save the user
time by opening a bunch of newsgroups from a Usenet
server site all at once with one bookmark click.

You may claim that the resulting tab labeling is "as
designed", but I doubt you'll claim that the design
doesn't need reconsideration and reimplementation,
in light of its bad results.

What is shown as labels is utterly worthless, but if
the tab labeling took advantage of knowing it was
invoked from a bookmark, then the bookmark names
could be assigned by the user to make each label the
newsgroup name instead of an identical site titling
prefix, making the tab labels useful to the user.

FYI

xanthian.