42072 - Personal Toolbar folder should list Home & other default links

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P2)

Description

[johng]

Currently, within "Bookmarks" is a folder called Personal Toolbar, but the 
contents in the Personal Toolbar folder do not match what is actually in the 
Personal Toolbar (the toolbar just beneath back/forward buttons).

For example, for the Netscape branded build, the first icons in the toolbar 
after the Bookmarks folder are:
Home
My Netscape
Net2Phone

Yet none of these 3 are listed in the Personal Toolbar folder.

The Personal Toolbar folder should:
> list these items
> but user can not delete, move, rename or edit "Home"
> can delete, move, rename and edit the other 2 as well as all other items added 
to the Personal Toolbar.

This sound like it could be handled in an overlay.

Don, is this a feature?  If so, let's nominate it nsbeta2.

Comment 1

[don]

Ben, can you "do the right thing" here?

Johm, I don't think this is a beta 2 blocker, but I agree: let's fix it for beta
3.

Comment 2

[johng]

nav triage team:
assigning to law per Don's suggestion
Since we are getting lots of complaints about this, marking b3nav+
cc'ing slamm

Comment 3

[johng]

nav triage team:
nsbeta3+

Comment 4

[johng]

*** Bug 48519 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Bill Law]

It's not quite that simple, as it turns out.

"Home" and "Net2Phone" are kind of special because they need to execute JS code
that can only execute in context of the Navigator chrome.  Although we can stuff
bookmarks with javascript: URLs that do this, I think the ability to do that is
actually a bug (I've opened bug 48697 for that).

So I think we can't use vanilla bookmarks for these items.  Plus, the
restrictions on what one can do with "Home" means we need some special code in
the bookmarks.js, anyway.

So my theory is that we should add code that manipulates these special bookmarks
in some "special" manner.

One approach would be to use an RDF template to add to the personal toolbar and
to the contents of the "Manage Bookmarks" window.  We'd need some special code
in the JS for "Manage Bookmarks" to manipulate the underlying RDF database
(e.g., update the database when the user modified the properties of one of these
special bookmarks).

A simpler, although perhaps less elegant approach, would be to simply insert
these special bookmarks into the "Manage Bookmarks" window.  Code could
distinguish between these pseudo-bookmarks and the real ones to disable
operations on "Home" and do something different for the other two (set some
state somewhere, probably a non-UI pref, that would also control whether these
buttons appeared on the personal tool bar.

I kind of prefer this second option because it is probably less work, all in all
(no new files to add to the build, etc.).  But, it gets a little tricky because
some of these buttons are only in the Netscape build yet the code to manipulate
them would likely have to go into Mozilla.  But that might be OK since much of
it is also applicable to the Home button, which is also in Mozilla.

One other issue is in regard to the merging of existing Communicator profiles.
 I'm not sure how that works, and this bug does not say what is required to
happen in such cases.  For example, should these pseudo-Bookmarks be inserted
into the existing profile's personal toolbar folder?

I'm adding Ben Goodger to the cc: list.  I'd like he and Steve Lamm to comment
on the strategies I outlined above (or suggest a new one).

Comment 6

[Bill Law]

There might be a third implementation option.  We could simply add prefs with UI
that lets the user turn the My Netscape and Net2Phone buttons on/off.  The still
wouldn't appear in Manage Bookmarks and you wouldn't be able to edit them.

Come to think of it, I don't think we should permit editing the URLs for these
pseudo-bookmarks anyway, due to the security considerations.

This option would require some xul/js for the prefs (straightforward), plus, a
bit of code to check the pref before inserting/removing these buttons.

Comment 7

[Bill Law]

Bug 48697 was a false alarm.  Bookmarks URLs cannot do xpconnect.  Thus, Home
and Net2Phone must be special buttons inserted by chrome JS code or via overlays.

The Manage Bookmarks window is going to have to deal with these as special
cases.  Maybe I should reassign to slamm?

Comment 8

[johng]

per our latest discussion, we will "punt" on having these items appear in the 
personal toolbar folder, but will only give the user a way to delete My Netscape 
and Net2Phone.

Bill and I discussed this.  I therefore am removing the nsbeta3+ from this bug. 
 See new bug 49431.

Comment 9

[Bill Law]

Marking [nsbeta3-] (and removing my indication that this is of [medium]
complexity.  When we go to fix this for real, we should consider doing it
"properly" so that these meta-bookmarks are generalized somehow.

Comment 10

[Claudius Gayle]

*** Bug 50015 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

We would like to fix this, but it sounds involved. Bill Law, can you give a quick 
summary on how to fix this the "right" way?

Comment 12

[Rafael Ebron (:rebron)]

Current implementation is better.

Comment 13

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

ben shd take this. 

Comment 14

[Rafael Ebron (:rebron)]

ugh, my 2cents.  Current implementation makes a whole lot of sense.  

If we did it the "right" way and had everything in the Personal Toolbar Menu of
Bookmarks note the following:

1)  If a user deletes the home button, there's no way for users to ever get that
functionality back onto the personal toolbar
2)  If what we're doing is trying to drive traffic to My Netscape and Net2Phone,
those links would not show up for existing users in their personal toolbar if
this was implemented as proposed because bookmarks are migrated over from
previous profiles.

Comment 15

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

not going to do for beta1, marking nsbeta1-

Comment 16

[Paul Chen]

Marking nsbeta1- bugs as future to get off the radar.

Comment 17

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

Are "my netscape" and "net2phone" in Navigator's "Select which buttons you'd
like to see..." prefs now, with all the rest? I don't have a commercial build.
If that's what this bug is for (discussion seems to indicate so), resummarize,
otherwise, mark it invalid or fixed.

Comment 18

[Bill Law]

Those buttons can be turned off in prefs (in Netscape).  Closing as WONTFIX.

Comment 19

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying WontFix bugs which haven't changed since 2001-12-31.

use the search string "BoletusEdulis" if you want to filter out this msg.