304679 - Clicking orange feeds icon in location bar sometimes loads feed and sometimes displays popup menu

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[Thomas Rutter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050814 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050814 Firefox/1.0+

On a site which has live feeds available (orange icon), clicking the orange icon
in the location bar has a different effect depending on whether the site has one
feed or multiple feeds.

There is no way to tell if the site has one feed or multiple feeds before
clicking the button.  Therefore, there is no way for the user to know what is
going to happen when they left-click the icon until they click it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Navigate to http://www.sitepoint.com/ which has multiple feeds
2. Click the orange feeds button in location bar

3. Navigate to http://www.planet-php.net/ which has one feed
4. Click the orange feeds button in location bar

Actual Results:  
Step 2 results in a popup menu appearing telling me which feeds are available.

Step 4 results in the site's feed loading in the main window, with no
intermediate popup

Expected Results:  
Step 2 and 4 should have consistent results.

The best solution IMHO would be to always pop up a menu listing the feeds
available, even when there is only one feed.  This will ensure consistency.

Alternatively, there should be some way of prior signalling that when you click
on the icon something different will happen.  For example, the icon could
contain an arrow when there are multiple feeds available and no arrow when there
is only one feed.

The orange icon in the location bar seems to be new in recent nightly builds.

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This behaviour is as-designed. Our goal is to interpret user actions with
minimal interference. We use the drop-down to disambiguate a click-action on the
RSS button; when there's only one RSS feed, the click-action isn't ambiguous,
and so the drop-down isn't necessary.

Changing the icon so that we can represent single vs. multiple available feeds
is a good idea, but a separate bug IMO. Please open one for that (and add me to
the cc list) and we can discuss what we should be doing there. Thanks!

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Opened bug 304862 to track new icon request.

Comment 3

[Tanner M. Young [:tmyoung]]

Resetting QA Contact to default.