415580 - please remove certain default bookmarks from Firefox 3

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[John Slater]

After talking to pkim & beltzner, we'd like to remove the following default bookmarks from Firefox 3:
- Help & Tutorials
- Customize
- Get Involved
- About Us

This is for the sake of simplicity...most of the relevant content on these pages will be now contained on the revised Getting Started page.

Speaking of that page, Getting Started should remain in its current place as the first bookmark in the default toolbar.

Thanks,
John

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

This is a significant l10n change.

We might want to consider doing a patch for l10n from our side for this.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

That's not "certain" default bookmarks, it's all bookmarks, as far as the menu is concerned. If we really need to do this, more than a week after it should have been done, before someone goes tearing off to fix it in all the locales we need someone to figure out how we manage to have an empty bookmarks menu that doesn't look broken: if it ends with the AMO bookmark pretending to be a command, then a separator, a few pixels of blank space, and then the end of the menu, it doesn't look like simplicity, it looks like it's broken.

I presume that we're doing this based on actual evidence that it will... do something good? Like, we've studied both the use of the various default pages, and how long the people hitting them have had the browser installed, and whether or not they had already deleted the Getting Started bookmark to free up their personal toolbar before they hit the Get Involved bookmark to see how they could help, some months after they started using the browser?

I know what the previous design had in mind, a quick and obvious Getting Started that people who knew how to use bookmarks would delete fairly quickly, and things that people were more likely to want after they'd been using the browser a while tucked away in the menu, but I'm not quite sure what this new design of a single bookmark with a name that says "delete me as soon as possible" is hoping to achieve. Are the (probably quite large) group of people who don't know that they can delete Getting Started (who are the only people that it serves as a replacement for the other bookmarks) both bothered by the presence of a folder of bookmarks in the menu, and likely to realize that when they want help months later, or want to get involved in Mozilla, that those things will come from Getting Started? Do so few people ever click the Get Involved bookmark (the only one I have a real serious interest in) that it just isn't worth having?

Comment 3

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

(In reply to comment #1)
> This is a significant l10n change.

Yes, and I apologize for that, it's an imperfect world and we only got around to having this discussion recently.

Phil, your point is well-taken. Let's start with the design problem: we currently ship with a plethora of bookmarks, most of which are of little to no use for the user, and point to pages which we don't really maintain. So our design goal is: reduce the number of bookmarks to the minimally required set which are useful and helpful.

The initial design proposal was to limit this list to "Getting Started", which had us thinking of just removing the entire folder of Mozilla bookmarks. As you point out, that would make the default Bookmark menu a little strange.

So let's figure it out: what other bookmarks should we include? Safari ships with bookmarks to commonly used websites, but that seems like a localization headache. We'd considered including a bookmark to SUMO, but that's already linked in the Help menu. Perhaps we should maintain a link to Add-ons and a permanent one to Firefox Start?

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

(You're so lucky you're not getting the eleven paragraphs I wrote.)

*So* not a plethora - since Getting Started and the livemark aren't on the chopping block, we're talking about either four or five, depending on whether you count the Bookmark Addons one that's pretending it's chrome.

But looking at the content, I guess you're right, and five web pages is more than we can fill. Does our current web page aesthetic prohibit having a single content-rich portal page, so we could have one Getting Started on the toolbar, and one Firefox Central that would link to sources of Mozilla news, and support, and ways to give feedback, and where to find out about all the ways to customize, not just extensions, extension, and dictionaries like the current customize page, and how to get involved? If it's going to be a bookmark I won't delete after clicking it once, it's going to have to be something I would want to see more than once, and the current pages are so short I can just memorize every word.

Comment 5

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Mike, John, is this still on?

Comment 6

[John Slater]

Thanks for bringing this up again, Axel. The idea of removing the bookmarks is off the table, but I'd still like to refresh the content. The goal is to point these bookmarks to new pages that are being created for the 2008 website, rather than reusing content that by this point is pretty outdated. 

I'm very open to suggestions as to the best way to do this, but here's what Beltzner and I were thinking about:
- Help could point to SUMO
- Customize could point to AMO
- About could point to the About Mozilla page that's been created for Mozilla.com
- Get Involved could point to the Get Involved page that's been created for Mozilla.com (note: the text is exactly the same as the FF2 version, so no new l10n would be needed).

Obviously there are l10n issues that would need to be discussed. Pascal, what do you think? I talked to Beltzner about this and here's what he said: 
"Right now the bookmarks point to locale-specific pages using the standard formatting, so we can redirect them to en-US until there's locale specific content in case it can't be ready for launch. I'm fine with that."

Pascal, if we do this the Get Involved and About bookmarks will be included pointing to those mozilla.com properties using the standard localization URL format

I can then file an IT bug to have server redirects included for when we push the new mozilla.com site such that:

http://%LOCALE%.www.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/firefox/help/
   --> redirects to SUMO (carrying along locales if SUMO supports that)

http://%LOCALE%.www.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/firefox/customize/
   --> redirects to AMO (carrying on locales if AMO supports them)

We can also do this for the redirects:

http://%LOCALE%.www.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/firefox/community/
   --> redirects to new moco page address

http://%LOCALE%.www.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/firefox/about/
   --> redirects to new moco page address

So, to sum up, the idea is to keep the bookmarks in there but change where they're pointing. Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

Thanks,
John

Comment 7

[Pascal Chevrel (relman team) -> :pascalc]

So we would move from having pages in our bookmarks localized today in 44 languages to redirects to almost en-US only content ? That sounds like a very bad idea and a waste of our localizers past work. I don't see what the "new moco page address" is, does it provide community content like links to our community portals, localization groups and localized developer resources like the current community page?

To be honest, I don't understand what problem this is supposed to solve and I don't see why we do not put redirects when/if new content is created and localized in the future. However good the English content is (will be?), replacing localized content by english pages is a serious regression for the end-user and removing all links to our community sites from mozilla.com doesn't sound like a good idea if we want to see them grow.

Comment 8

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I can then file an IT bug to have server redirects included for when we push
> the new mozilla.com site such that:

Redirects for what you want done are handled directly by the www.mozilla.com webmasters, so just file a bug against the www.mozilla.com component to add them instead of IT.

Comment 9

[John Slater]

Regarding Pascal's comment #7, we had a long chat over IM earlier today and resolved a few misunderstandings. After our discussion, we agreed to keep the bookmarks but have them link to the following:

Help -> SUMO   
Customize -> http://%LOCALE%.www.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/firefox/addons/
Get Involved -> keep link as is, but update page with new CSS
About -> keep link as is, but update page with new CSS (individual locales can keep the current content, but I'd like the en-US content to look like this: https://www-firefox3.stage.mozilla.com/en-US/about/whatismozilla.html)

Also, just to clarify a few things about Pascal's comments above, my intention was never to remove localized pages in favor of en-US...it was, always has been, and always will be to provide a better user experience by making these pages as good as possible (for everyone). We might not always agree about the best way to do that, but hopefully we're all working towards that goal.

Anyway, I'm resolving this bug as WONTFIX b/c this solution no longer really applies to the initial topic.

Comment 10

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Are there follow up bugs filed? If so, could you make them depend on this one, so that we that in the files?

Thanks.

Comment 11

[John Slater]

Per Axel's request, I just updated the following bugs to depend on this one:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424209
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424204

Those cover the redirects for the Help & Customize bookmarks.