356733 - "Add a Keyword for this search": poor wording, as the item is often not a "search".

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Julian Foad]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060911 SUSE/1.5.0.7-1.1 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060911 SUSE/1.5.0.7-1.1 Firefox/1.5.0.7

The context menu item "Add a Keyword for this search" appears on every "<input>" text box.  Such a field often has nothing to do with any search, and so the reference to "this search" is confusing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox>.
2. Right-click on a single-line text input box, e.g. the "Summary" box on that page, that has nothing to do with any search.

Actual Results:  
We see a menu item "Add a Keyword for this search", and wonder what "this search" refers to.

Expected Results:  
I am not specifying what the correct behaviour should be.  Some suggestions:
1. Revise the text to make it more understandable.
2. Only show that menu item if the field in question seems to be a search field (perhaps determined in the same way that it currently determines whether and where to insert "%s" in the URL).

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Anything we wanna change here?

Comment 2

[Timothy Green]

Suggestion 2 (showing the option only where it actually is a search) strikes me as problematic. First, I don't know how, algorithmically, that could be decided. Second, there are plenty of uses for this feature which aren't actual searches. I use it on Dictionary.com. I also use it to put URLs into Web-Sniffer.net, Who.is, and the W3C's HTML and CSS validators.

Comment 3

[Felix Fung (:felix)]

Confirming. We're basically doing this for most input fields attached to a form. We can either change the wording or show the message only when it's accurate.

If we want the latter, the deciding code is ~line 1287 in nsContextMenu.js
  isTargetAKeywordField: function(aNode) {

Comment 4

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

Unless we want to restrict the "add keyword" to only apply to HTML5 input types that are "search" (which probably isn't used much yet), I'm not sure how we can make this any better than it is. It's ambiguous, I agree.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Lacking any better suggestions, not much we can do here. I think "search" is accurate in the common case.