405487 - add a static "Unfiled Bookmarks" item to the bookmarks menu

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

add a static "Unfiled Bookmarks" item to the bookmarks menu

I believe we have plans to add a static "Bookmarks toolbar" item to the bookmarks menu.

this would add "Unfiled bookmarks" so that people who star pages can find them without having to open the organizer.

this request comes from comes from watching a user "star" pages (using the "star" button), and then going to the bookmarks menu looking for them, and not finding them.

I realize with a lot of unfiled bookmarks this menu item would be pretty huge.

hmm, with unfiled bookmarks, do we append or insert at the beginning of the folder?  Maybe we should insert at the beginning?  (I can spin that off to a separate bug.)

Comment 1

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Note inserting at the beginning of a folder may be very expensive due to AdjustIndicies.

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

> Note inserting at the beginning of a folder may be very expensive due to
> AdjustIndicies.

good point, mano.  

I think we should confirm if that is the case (if you are right, then dnd of a bookmark to the top of a folder with a lot of elements would be slow, too.) and then log a bug about improving the perf of AdjustIndices()

Comment 4

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

This is WONTFIX. We might want to consider adding the "Recently Starred Items" to the Bookmarks Menu, but the design for this was specifically to avoid cluttering the bookmarks menu with starred items.

Comment 5

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

> We might want to consider adding the "Recently Starred Items"
> to the Bookmarks Menu

there is a bug about adding a static menu for the toolbar to the bookmarks menu, and "Recently Starred Items" is an item there, but it is limited to the last 10.

> the design for this was specifically to avoid cluttering the bookmarks menu 
> with starred items.

I was suggesting a item (a query) under which we'd get all the unfiled bookmarks, but your point is taken.

> Maybe we should insert at the beginning? 

hmm, since it would be a query, we should just sort by date descending, and continue to append.  but there still might be a perf issue with AdjustIndices() so I'll log that bug.

Comment 6

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

I agree with beltzner's decision to wontfix.  Here is are rational for not doing this:

-Hitting the star is easy (by design), so users may end up with 2000 or 3000
unfiled bookmarks.  This is great in terms of searching against the places
database, but obviously can't scale to a browse-based UI like a folder on the
bookmarks toolbar, both in terms of usability and literally populating a with
that many items.

-If users see a huge list of bookmarks growing they may feel like they need to
manage the mess, instead of just searching against it.  If they do take a bunch
of time to file away all of the unfiled bookmarks, they may think to themselves
"that took forever and wasn't very fun, I need to bookmark less pages so I
don't have a such a queue of unorganized stuff in the future."  If that feeling
results in the user bookmarking fewer pages, than we have defeated the original
goal of making bookmarking light weight, easy, and faster than just searching
google for what you are looking for (which is what most people do instead of
bookmarking pages).

Comment 8

[John]

"-Hitting the star is easy (by design), so users may end up with 2000 or 3000
unfiled bookmarks."

O.o 
......................

Why can't Firefox just cater to most people, who have 0-a few bookmarks? Or even to semipower users like me with. about 2 dozen.

So with 2-3K, I can see the advantage of Unfiled and starring and just searching for it I guess, but most people don't have 2-3K bookmarks.
===
For this radical paradigm shift from bookmark and file and click away later to one click and search for it to be useful, the user has to be trained, and they have to use a lot of bookmarks.
===
I vote for starred items to go to "bookmarks menu".

Or even better, get rid of the star!

Comment 9

[John]

"-Hitting the star is easy (by design), so users may end up with 2000 or 3000
unfiled bookmarks."

So...

I thought the advantage of star, don't file, and just search away was exactly that.

I bookmarked some stuff in Toolbar, Menu, Unfiled. Cleared data. tried to search for this bookmark via autocomplete location bar rather than click it, and nope, nothing pops up...

So a user has 3k bookmarks, cleared private data, was thinking of this cat pic he saw on flickr. Types in cat, oops, he done deleted it from History. Or is something wrong with this?

Comment 10

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

John, after clearing history I still see tagged bookmarks in the locationbar autocomplete.
For the bookmarks without tags see bug 278747.

Comment 11

[Peter Hewitt]

I dislike the term "unfiled bookmarks" as I read the menu as 

Bookmarks Toolbar
Bookmarks Menu
UNIFIED bookmarks (as in ones that should appear on both)

Perhaps using "starred pages" would be better and users could relate it to gmail then. At the moment I feel it is confusing.

Comment 12

[John]

I also read it as unified bookmarks for the first few hours. bah.

Comment 14

[John]

The Bookmarks Sidebar is meant for a place of access, like the Bookmarks Menu, as opposed to the Organizer, which is a place of organizing.

So why is Unsorted accessible from the Sidebar?

Comment 16

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 417148, "Clicking the Star should file to the Bookmarks Menu", also WONTFIX.

Comment 17

[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