285096 - Shortcut for History toggles History on, but will not toggle it off.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: History, defect)

Description

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050306 Camino/0.8+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050306 Camino/0.8+

Cmd-Y brings up the History, which makes perfect sense, as this is the shortcut
listed in the menu.

Once the History pane is brought up, though, no amount of cmd-Y-ing will make it
go away. Rather, one must now go Back or close the tab in which the history was
opened in order to make it go away. This seems rather counterintuitive, as a
"Show [item]" menu item logically should be accompanied by a "Hide [item]" menu
item.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a browser window.
2. Press cmd-Y or select "Show History" from View menu.
3. Attempt to dismiss history by typing cmd-Y again, or by looking for "Hide
History" in View menu.
4. Revel in the resulting confusion. Optionally, you may bang your head against
a hard surface.
Actual Results:  
What happened: I got a bruise on my head.

Expected Results:  
What should have happened: I should have been presented with a "Hide History"
menu item in the View menu, with cmd-Y as its shortcut.

Comment 1

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

this has been covered in a bunch of other bugs. show history isn't a toggle by
design, the only toggle is cmd-b show/hide all bookmarks.

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Respectfully, *why* is there no negative complement to "Show History?" "Because
we said so" is a perfectly fine *answer*, but it's not a *reason.*

As far as I can see, every single "Show..." option in Camino has a "Hide"
counterpart, EXCEPT for History. Why is History any different from everything else?

Comment 3

[L. H.]

Read bug 266394 comment 2

Comment 4

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

That still doesn't explain why History is the only "Show" item not to have a
corresponding "Hide." The Toolbar is toggled on and off with cmd-opt-T. The
bookmark bar is toggled on and off with cmd-opt-B. The bookmark manager is
toggled on and off with cmd-B. Remind me one more time why History isn't toggled?

cl

Comment 5

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

because it's the bookmark manager that's being toggled. history is just one view
of said manager.

Comment 6

[Ben]

(In reply to comment #5)
> because it's the bookmark manager that's being toggled. history is just one view
> of said manager.

I really think you should consider implementing the history toggle. It doesn't
make sense to me to think of the History as a subset of the bookmarks. And being
an average Camino user, I don't think it would make sense to the average Camino
user. If I had my way, the History would not be included under groups in the
bookmarks window. Or maybe both the bookmarks and the history can be considered
subsets of a main collection, like playlists in a library. Anyway, that's not
what I wanted to comment on.

This is my opinion on how the boomarks and history toggles should work (as
posted on the Camino mozillazine forum):

1. Clicking on either the bookmarks or history buttons would toggle it on- ok,
so it does that already, that's fine.

2. Clicking on that same button again would toggle it off again as expected.

3. Clicking on history while bookmarks is open would swap to history and vice
versa. Clicking again on history would close history/bookmarks and take you back
to your page.

To me, the history is separate from the bookmarks, it does not make much sense
to put the history under the bookmarks. I know they are related but I don't know
if the average user would understand that they are related and so it would not
occur to them that that is why the history button won't toggle the history off
again.

Perhaps if there was some visual clue, like having the buttons sunken or dark as
previously mentioned then there would be no confusion as to which was open.
Clicking either button would make it dark or sunken like most toggle buttons,
clicking it again would "raise" the button and turn it off.

Safari manages this well with the bookmarks button, it makes it easier to
understand why the page you were looking at appears again after turning off the
bookmarks because you can almost picture the button switching on a window that
sits on top of your window, leaving your page behind it, a bit like bringing
dashboard over your screen.

The problem is it would look strange to have sunken buttons in the main toolbar,
that is why I think the bookmarks and history favicons in the bookmarks bar
should be altered to have this feature if possible and to have it as standard
when Camino is installed.

Comment 7

[Ben]

What I'm trying to say is please reconsider altering this beheaviour, I think
the result would be that Camino would be more intuitive and easy to use.

Ben

Comment 8

[Ben]

I have posted a new bug outlining some proposed changes to the organisation of
the bookmark manager, see the following link:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311286