403226 - make location bar drop down similar to search bar

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Ivan Ičin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007110805 Minefield/3.0b2pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007110805 Minefield/3.0b2pre

Currently, there are too many controls on the right side of the location bar (rss feed, star, drop down, go). Moving drop-down arrow to the right would help to ease this problem, and it would also make location bar and search bar much more similar. I think that if you take into account bug 393508, it would be even more logical to put this control at this point.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Ivan Ičin]

Attachment: mockup

Here is mockup of how it would look like.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

I don't agree (except for remark about the confusing number of controls).

A drop down button always works on content immediately left to it, so that the popup also appears on the left. The search control has it in the left side control, because it lets you choose the search service (icon). The one in the locationbar lets you choose the url.

Besides, the favicon on the left currently hides a /different/ popup (try it on <https://www.mozilla.org/>, and the drop down button has nothing to do with it.

Comment 3

[Ivan Ičin]

(In reply to comment #2)

> A drop down button always works on content immediately left to it, so that the
> popup also appears on the left.
Try choosing search engine from drop down, and I can't see any difference on how pop-up appears.

> The search control has it in the left side
> control, because it lets you choose the search service (icon). The one in the
> locationbar lets you choose the url.
> 
> Besides, the favicon on the left currently hides a /different/ popup (try it on
> <https://www.mozilla.org/>, and the drop down button has nothing to do with it.
> 
I think that you change page, and page is represented by favicon, so dropdown is logical. In new drop down, titles will be more prominent than urls, so dropdown after URLs doesn't make that sense.

My personal opinion is that URLs are as obsolete as DOS prompt, and I hope that in Firefox 5 or so we won't even have to think about them. But Firefox 3 will be a nice step toward that aim. Again, see bug 393508 for how the location bar will look like.

Comment 4

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #3)

> My personal opinion is that URLs are as obsolete as DOS prompt, and I hope that
> in Firefox 5 or so we won't even have to think about them. But Firefox 3 will
> be a nice step toward that aim. Again, see bug 393508 for how the location bar
> will look like.
> 

I'm perfectly familiar with Alex's work. So you want a large popup, where the contents appear RIGHT of the drop-down button (the last example will be implemented soon)? No way, that's totally against every GUI rule there exists.

We should better concentrate on simplifying the existing location bar, rather than introducing concept that conflict with every other GUI.

Comment 5

[Ivan Ičin]

(In reply to comment #4)

> I'm perfectly familiar with Alex's work. So you want a large popup, where the
> contents appear RIGHT of the drop-down button (the last example will be
> implemented soon)? No way, that's totally against every GUI rule there exists.
Last implemetation is Firefox search bar. Please click on that arrow right to Google icon in search bar and see how the drop down appears.

Comment 6

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

The comparison between the behavior of the search engine drop down and the location bar drop down is certainly interesting.  It's something that I never thought of, and I think you do have a pretty solid argument that the two are similar.  However, here are the concerns I have:

-Internal consistency with previous versions of Firefox: user's will be trained to locate the drop down on the right site
-External consistency with other web browsers: again user's will be trained to locate the drop down on the right side
-Confusion with the site button: usually drop downs buttons right next to another button indicate that the two controls have a related purpose (for instance, the zoom control in IE7, or their search button), but in this case the two buttons are not related

I totally agree with your overall goal of simplifying the right hand side of the location bar, which has become pretty chaotic.  Our plan is to only have the Star and the Web feed icons there normally.  The lock will move to the site button, the go button will only appear when the user is entering a URL, and the drop down arrow will only appear on mouse hover on the location bar.  Hopefully these changes will significantly improve the visual complexity of the right side of the location bar, since the only item normally there will be a star icon.

Even though I am wontfixing, please note that I really appreciate creative UI ideas, and I did seriously consider the idea for a few days.

Comment 7

[Ivan Ičin]

Alex, thanks for the comment, one can see from the wording that you are a really great guy (BTW, some other people from this thread could take notes on how to do that).

I must say that I was aware of the first two facts about consistency that you have mentioned. However, my personal opinion is that user experience consistency is above those two consistency you have mentioned. Actually, if those principles were generally applied to Firefox it wouldn't have more than 5% market share (and there were some ideas before launch to make toolbar look like IEs for the sake of consistency). I believe that differentiation is a selling point if it is meaningful, and I hope that that's the case here.

For the point no.3, I just don't agree - I think that drop down actually means "chose site from the list below", and I find it fairly related with site icon. As I've said, you shouldn't look at drop down as a list of URLs, as they are just accidentally there - you could have e.g. list of previews of those sites. In that case, where would it make more sense to put drop down?

Alex, you probably remember that once I closed one of my bugs with wontfix after your comments and you reopened it saying that it might be interesting for further consideration. So I am not the one that doesn't accept arguments, but I would be greatful if you replied to this comment.

Comment 8

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

>my personal opinion is that user experience
>consistency is above those two consistency you have mentioned.

I agree that breaking consistency is good when you can create a better user interface.  For instance, the interaction of the star contextual dialog isn't exactly consistent with anything.

>you could have e.g. list of previews of those sites.
>In that case, where would it make more sense to put drop down?

I'll be sure to bring the idea up with Mike Connor and Mike Beltzner to see what they think.  If we both hide the drop down until you hover on the location bar, and we also move it, we are going really decrease discoverability.  So moving it means we would probably need to make it always visible, which unfortunately goes against our previous goal of slimming down the UI for this release.  Either way, I'll give it some more thought.

Comment 9

[Ivan Ičin]

Alex, thanks for the answer, I knew that you will consider arguments.

I must say that my initial idea was not to propose change in drop-down, but as words passed by, I think that drop down should be radically changed, so that it is populated with smart folders (making them much more discoverable) and with previews of pages and titles (if previews are technically possible as some of the pages might have been accessed a while ago (though if they do appear in smart folder, it is highly unlikely).

> If we both hide the drop down until you hover on the location
> bar, and we also move it, we are going really decrease discoverability.
I fully agree. But IMHO, making UI element appear on hover is not a good thing, unless it is something very contextual (e.g. go button that appears only when you type makes sense, as you obviously won't need it before you start typing). I can't see a good reason why you wouldn't apply the same policy of appearing on hover on back and forward buttons. Actually, I guess that the real reason  to hide drop down is because it is not so useful as other buttons in toolbar. But then real solution should be in making it more useful or removing it/putting it in menus.

Comment 10

[Ivan Ičin]

> I agree that breaking consistency is good when you can create a better user
> interface.  For instance, the interaction of the star contextual dialog isn't
> exactly consistent with anything.
I think that drop-down next to site icon is quite consistent with some generally accepted rules. Think of changing colors in MS Office. You have current color as icon and drop down to chose new color. Just change the word "color" to "site", and you'll find it is nearly the same as my proposal.