310885 - Unified Sidebar with Opened Pages, Bookmarks and History

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, 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

Tabs are great when you are only opening a few pages, however if you want to
open more pages, the tabs soon become crowded. Right now, Camino's solution is
to use an overflow menu, which is not very efficient since the user has to click
twice to switch to a page.

My suggestion is to ditch the tab bar in favor of a sidebar, which extends from
the left/right edge (depending on the setting) of the browser (similar to the
info sidebar of iCal). It will display a list of opened pages with the current
page highlighted. In order to avoid two clicks, this sidebar will automatically
extend out when the user moves the mouse cursor past the left/right edge of the
browser. One problem with this UI is that it wastes a lot of screen real estate.
 To minize this problem, the sidebar will automatically shrink back when the
user moves away from it.

We can go further than this and include Bookmarks and History in the sidebar as
well. The items could be arranged in the following way:

Opened Web Pages
   -Titles of opened web pages

Bookmarks
   -(S)Bookmarks Bar
   -(S)Quick Searches
   -(S)Bonjour
   -(S)Addressbook
   -(Separator)
   -Normal Bookmark Folders

History
   -Arranged by date

On the bottom of the sidebar, there will be a search field, which will search
all of the sections listed above. In order to avoid the dreaded verticle
scrollbar, only one section will be shown in the expanded state at any time.
Lastly, all of the sections will be "spring-loaded" to facilitate DnD manipulation

ps. (S) means Special Folder

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

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

You're talking about a "drawer" not really a sidebar, if I'm understanding
correctly, and what you're basically proposing is what OmniWeb does.

I'd call this bloat for sure and would recommend a WONTFIX. I could have sworn
this has come up before, but I can't seem to find a bug on it.

For the record, we've had history and bookmarks in a "sidebar" (drawer) and they
have been removed. Moving them back would be a step backwards for Camino.

Comment 2

[L. H.]

(In reply to comment #0)
> In order to avoid two clicks, this sidebar will automatically
> extend out when the user moves the mouse cursor past the left/right edge of the
> browser. One problem with this UI is that it wastes a lot of screen real estate.
>  To minize this problem, the sidebar will automatically shrink back when the
> user moves away from it.

That is very very bad UI. Users can't go to straight the right place in dynamic
UI they can't see so changing tabs would be difficult. It would also be very
hard to click on a window behind the front window because the drawer would open
and block you.

Comment 3

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

The WONTFIX you're looking for is bug 188223.

To recap the other WONTFIX points on the drawer (in addition to comment 2 and
the real estate issue), it's not good at managing anything, and we're not going
to waste precious time/manpower maintaining two UIs.

WONTFIX rather than duping to keep down bugspam.