365426 - changing of sort order or key in History Sidebar could be clearer

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Ray Kiddy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1


After using Firefox for a while, I finally realized that I could change the sort order and key of the History sidebar by clicking on the View button, which brings up a menu.

This is an odd interface.

First, the View button looks to be associated with the Search field next to it. Logically, they do not make sense together, but the visual connection is very strong. One sees "Search <blank> View". That does not make a logical phrase.

Second, there is a contextual menu in the history list view. That is probably a better place for the sorting switches.

Third, the default order is by site. I would guess that this is the least common choice. It is just a guess, but ordering by last viewed is probably much more common.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open the History sidebar in any page

Actual Results:  
The items are sorted by name, which seems weird, and one cannot see how to change the sorting.

Expected Results:  
The contextual menu on the history list view in the sidebar should allow me to see the sort order for the view.

Comment 1

[Ray Kiddy]

FYI, I can see that the changes in the js and the XUL to put the menu for sorting into the contextual menu are fairly trivial.

Would this violate the norms of the UI on Windows or Linux? If so, how are changes to the UI like this, done in the XUL layer, viewed when they are specific to one platform? If this is Mac-only, would making the change to the XUL and js in the Mac platform only be a problem?

Comment 3

[Ray Kiddy]

Sorry about that. I was discussing this bug and could not find it. Thought I might not have filed it.

Comment 4

[nick yahnke]

Ray Kiddy:
On my Windows XP SP2
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4

It appears as a button that is implemented similarly to the html input element. They look identical, except the button also somewhat unexpectedly is a contextual menu.
However on XP there is a arrow pointing downwards in the button to the right of the text 'View'! This makes it quite a bit more obvious that a contextual may appear and is a huge improvement over the OSX version.

I hope this bug can be fixed!

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

moving enh to places

Comment 6

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Taking this one.

Comment 7

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Attachment: Patch v1

This is made on top of patch v2.1 of bug 422181. I know this is not really nice, but IMO it's okay.

>-  
>+
>+  initContextMenu();
>+
>   searchHistory("");

This removes whitespaces that don't belong there.

[Also it's not nice to remove code in bug 422181 and then add it back modified here (talking about initContextMenu()), but I think it's clearer like that.]

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

please ask an ui-r to faaborg or boriss or limi before an ctual code review, since i'm not sure this is wanted.

Comment 9

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

Before they can review it, I bet they'd appreciate a screenshot and a description of what it does!

Comment 10

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

> 16:02 < MichaelKohler> just adds a context menuitem to the 
>                       context menu for changing the sort order

I'm not sure that we actually want this. While I understand that it's not great UI right now, I don't think a context menu addition is a good solution. We should fix the actual UI problem. Perhaps if the button took on the name of the sort order being used? And if the search field expanded out if a user indicated that they wanted to filer/sort?

Comment 11

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Attachment: How it would look like

Comment 12

[Ray Kiddy]

Note that in the screen shot above, the contextual menu options for sorting would not change based on what is selected. That _does_ speak against its being "contextual". But the menu option needs to somehow be more obvious. A contextual menu would be seen before the sense of the "View" button became obvious.

And I am not sure what MB means by "the actual UI problem"?

I think that there are a few parts to the problem. Fixing any of them would
improve the situation. The parts of the problem seem to be:

1) the sort select button sits next to the search field and appears to be
related to the search functionality.

If the list were a table, it would be more obvious what to do about this. One
could click on a column header. Not that I am suggesting this should be a
table.

2) the label "View" gives no clue that the button sets the sort order.

The person on Windows XP pointed out that he sees an icon next to the word
"View" that gives some hint that it is about sorting. If would be nice to see
something like this on the Mac. Pull-down lists can have icons next to their
labels.

3) the choice of default sort ordering.

I have a personally built instance of Minefield from 20090131 and this sorts by
'Date' by default. Why is that a better choice for most people than 'Last
Visited'?

Comment 13

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

(in reply to comment 12)
>Note that in the screen shot above, the contextual menu options for sorting
>would not change based on what is selected. That _does_ speak against its being
>"contextual".

How do you mean that? Do you mean the radio buttons will not be changed?

They do..

Comment 14

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

Comment on attachment 375076 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1

I don't think this is the right solution. The sort action isn't contextual, and by moving the sorting action to a context menu, it gets even more confusing.

We should really look into how we show history in the browser in general, but if we need a quick fix for this particular issue, I would propose the following:

- Change the "View" button to have the text "Sort by"

- Remove the "by" text on each entry inside the menu

- Move the "Sort by" menu to its own row, under search.

Since this involves string changes, it's probably a no-go for 3.5, but I'll let others make that decision — still new to this. :)

Comment 15

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

And if we can do more than string changes, let the row show:

Sort by [Date and Site [v]
        |Site          |
        |Date          |
        |etc.          |
        |______________|

But again, all these are ugly workarounds. :)

Comment 16

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

changing summary to describe the problem. i also agree with other commenters that a context menu is not the right approach. if the "view" menu is confusing, then let's fix it, instead of adding hidden UI.

Comment 17

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

This won't be a bug in Firefox 3.7 final anymore, right?

Comment 18

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv

Comment 19

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

UX-team: any update on this?

Comment 20

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

It's unlikely that future versions of Firefox will use a sidebar interface for viewing history, so we shouldn't be spending any time modifying the current UI.

Comment 21

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

giving away this bug (more information see comment 20), thanks Alex for this update.

Comment 22

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

This is a mass change. Every comment has "assigned-to-new" in it.

I didn't look through the bugs, so I'm sorry if I change a bug which shouldn't be changed. But I guess these bugs are just bugs that were once assigned and people forgot to change the Status back when unassigning.

Comment 23

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

UI is detailed in comment 14, should we ever want to fix this. Removing uiwanted.

Comment 24

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.