310773 - Make adding bookmark shortcut searches (smart keywords) more discoverable

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, enhancement)

Description

[Yuan Qi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

I believe Smart Bookmarks are a lot easier to manage than entries in a plist
file. Camino already supports Smart Bookmarks, however, before this transition
can occur, the following things needs to be implemented:

1. Camino does not import the keywords of Firefox bookmarks
2. A popup menu entry for easy creation of Smart Bookmarks, similar to Firefox's
"Add a Keyword for this Search ..."
3. Conversion of plist file entries into Smart Bookmarks
4. Support of the site field
5. An UI tailored to the creation of Smart Bookmarks (We should change "Smart
Bookmarks" to "Search Engine" and "Keyword" to "Search Shortcut" to makes things
less confusing)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

What is your definition of "Smart Bookmarks"? I ask because we support keywords,
which don't necessarily have to be tied to a search site. I use them as
one/two/three letter ways to get to my most browsed sites. Changing the name
"keywords" to "search shortcuts" would make no sense whatsoever.

And how are we storing this "Smart Bookmarks" if not as a plist? I'm confused as
to what you're proposing.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Point 1 is bug 307743 (please search for existing bugs before filing new ones).
 Point 2 is likely to be excess confusing UI.  Beyond that, I'm also unclear at
what you want here.

Comment 3

[Yuan Qi]

Smart Bookmarks is this feature:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords

This feature is first featured on Galeon (and now Epiphany) and they named it
"Smart Bookmarks", which is rather confusing.

To test this feature on Camino, just copy and paste the URL
"http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%s&hl=en&lr=" to a bookmark and add a
keyword for the Bookmark (eg. "gs"). Now you can type "gs trisomy 13" into the
address bar to search the phrase "trisomy 13" in Google Scholar.

About Point 2: See the Firefox feature description for more details. Without
this feature, it would be very hard for the end user to add a Smart Bookmark.

About Point 5: The normal Bookmarks dialogue is not tailored towards Smart
Bookmarks.

Comment 4

[Yuan Qi]

I am recommending to turn this feature on by default because I believe it is a
useful feature to most people and is a good replacement of ".com" completion by
allowing more accuracy.

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

As Smokey said, Point 1 is in another bug.

Point 2 is definitely bloat.

I haven't the slightest what 3 is.

No clue what 4 is.

5 is about adding more UI that will probably be considered bloat. This is
something that can go in a pref-pane, but not in the main Camino UI.

Comment 6

[Yuan Qi]

Okay, so here is a clearification:

Point 1 and 2 is asking to implement Firefox's Smart Keyword feature. A detailed
description of the feature can be found here:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords 

Now before you judge Point 2 as feature bloat, please download Firefox first and
try this feature on it. You should notice that the menu entry will not appear
unless you right-clicked on a single line input field. You will also notice that
Smart Keywords would be very hard to use for the average user because most of
them don't have a clue about where to substitute %s.

Asfor point 3-5, please refer to
http://www.caminobrowser.org/support/docs/doc_search.html

The plist file is referring to SearchURLList.plist

The site field is referring to "%d"

For Point 5, I basically asking to rename some of the labels on the Add Bookmark
dialogue to more sensible labels when the user is trying to add a Smart Keyword.

Comment 7

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Aside from the contextual menu item, we already have the same UI and support for
this as in Firefox.  Call it what you like, the support is there.

The contextual menu is not very discoverable, and it's not a feature that people
will often (ex: I never knew Firefox had the contextual menu, and I've used the
feature before in another browser--once, when I first set up the browser. 
Adding search keywords is not an everyday operation.)

The whole search keywords/"smart bookmarks" feature is not an 80% feature.  Most
Camino users--most browser users, even--don't remove the built-in search field
from their toolbar.  Most don't add new search engines, either.

If we were to expend developer manpower on enhancing search, the thing that
would be most beneficial to most users would be developing a built-in mechanism
for adding more search sites to the built-in search field (and that would only
be beneficial to a small percentage of Camino users).  Note that this has yet to
happen.

People who would actually use the proposed feature are the same people who have
the proficiency to add a keyword and a %s string manually.

The most likely resolution of this bug is WONTFIX.

Comment 8

[Yuan Qi]

If it is true that 80% of users won't ever use the Smart Keyword feature, then I
guess there is really no need for this.

Comment 9

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

we've been kicking arouund the "right way" to do this. it's obviously very
useful but the current firefox approach is undiscoverable. stay tuned.

Comment 10

[Yuan Qi]

I think Epiphany might offer a few ideas on a better way to implement this,
after all, they (or more precisely, their predecessor Galeon) are the first to
implement the smart keyword/bookmark feature.

In particular, when the user types in a search term, Epiphany will display a
dropdown list with the item "Search the Web" highlighted. I believe the mozilla
suite has the same behaviour.

Right now, Firefox uses Sherlock files for its search box. I am not sure if
that's the best way to implement search, as it is highly doubtful whether or not
Apple is going to support Sherlock in the future.

Comment 11

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

I'm going to confirm this as a RFE, but change the summary to not specify a contextual menu item. Also, targeting for FUTURE.

Comment 12

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

*** Bug 328825 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Jacob Rus]

Maybe just having some screencasts showing off Camino features would let people know about the little hidden gems like keywords and incremental search that keep me using Camino over Safari.

Comment 14

[Matt Hughes]

Maybe the reason this is not an "80% feature" is because it is so hidden!

I use bookmark keywords all the time and the couple people I have told about them never knew it existed and now can't live without it.  It's so much easier to just type 'pg' (for personal gmail) and 'wg' (for work gmail) than to type out the whole thing or actually go to your bookmarks for the three, four sites you visit multiple times a day. 

This is still "broken" on Firefox 3 Beta 1 even with all the enhancements they did to bookmarks.  I'm adding it over there.

This "bug" also exists in Firefox.(In reply to comment #7)
> Aside from the contextual menu item, we already have the same UI and support
> for
> this as in Firefox.  Call it what you like, the support is there.
> 
> The contextual menu is not very discoverable, and it's not a feature that
> people
> will often (ex: I never knew Firefox had the contextual menu, and I've used the
> feature before in another browser--once, when I first set up the browser. 
> Adding search keywords is not an everyday operation.)
> 
> The whole search keywords/"smart bookmarks" feature is not an 80% feature. 
> Most
> Camino users--most browser users, even--don't remove the built-in search field
> from their toolbar.  Most don't add new search engines, either.
> 
> If we were to expend developer manpower on enhancing search, the thing that
> would be most beneficial to most users would be developing a built-in mechanism
> for adding more search sites to the built-in search field (and that would only
> be beneficial to a small percentage of Camino users).  Note that this has yet
> to
> happen.
> 
> People who would actually use the proposed feature are the same people who have
> the proficiency to add a keyword and a %s string manually.
> 
> The most likely resolution of this bug is WONTFIX.
> 

Comment 15

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: OmniWeb's UI

The nice thing about paid browsers is that it's harder for other browsers to steal your UI ideas ;)  I stumbled on this while looking at something else.

1. Click in a search field
2. See the search-glass-with-plus icon appear in the status bar and click on it
3. Change the prefilled sheet contents or accept them as is.

Comment 16

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

This bug has been buried in the graveyard and has not been updated in over 5 years. It is probably safe to assume that it will never be fixed, so resolving as WONTFIX.

[Mass-change filter: graveyard-wontfix-2014-09-24]