424044 - Right-click should provide contextual actions for location bar icons (favicon, rss icon, star, history dropdown etc., should implement context menu)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Brandon W Maister]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008031905 Minefield/3.0b5pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008031905 Minefield/3.0b5pre

Currently alternate-clicking on the text in the awesome bar does what you would expect of a text field, but it doesn't provide you with any actions for the site, rss, location history drop-down, or star icons. In fact, you get the "nav toolbar, ...|customize" dropdown that happens when you alt-click on the menu bar.

These are all interactive elements, like the back-forward button, and the star icon and rss icon especially seem like they should provide me with options. Basically I get frustrated every time I want to add an rss feed as a live bookmark (my default is gReader, but some things make more sense as live bookmarks) and I have to go unset a preference, do my thing, then later re-set the preference.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to some page with an rss feed
2. Try to do anything with it other than your default action
Actual Results:  
frustration and broken flow.

(Navigation toolbar
 Bookmarks Toolbar
-------------------
 Customize....     )

Expected Results:  
The soothing sensation of a job well-done.

(If you really care about my opinion, a list of what i consider sane menu items for the different icons:

favicon:
bookmark page
page info

rss icon:
add as live bookmark
view preview of feed
add to *default*

star icon:
manage bookmarks
add bookmark

history drop-down:
view history
remove page from history
view other pages tagged with *tags this page is tagged with*   )

Comment 1

[Brandon W Maister]

Looking at bug 270541 (I was going to add a bug for dragging the rss icon to the bookmarks bar) the idea of having "copy rss url to clipboard" in the rss icon alt-menu makes sense. As does a similar one for the favicon, except that's much harder to justify because of how easy it is to just right-click on the url field and it's all automatically highlighted.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

I'm changing the summary from "Alt click..." to "Right-click..." to avoid confusion with "Holding the Alt key and clicking...".

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This looks like a valid request for enhancement and should be confirmed, regardless of the details of what exactly should be on the context menus that this bug calls to implement.

Location bar icons are all interactive UI elements with several related actions. It seems reasonable and intuitive that users expect that element-related actions can be accessed via contextual menu of the respective elements, as is the case for almost every element of the UI. We can even right-click on the back-button.

Related Bug 506925 covers a subset of this bug (context menu for bookmark star) and has an interactive mockup (attachment 391081 [details]) of how such a context menu  could look and feel. Unfortunately it was claimed that a context menu on the star would be "undiscoverable" and the request was turned down rather quickly. This bug suggests otherwise.

The discussion in related Bug 428304 (right-click on star should remove bookmark) is also interesting for this bug because it has many comments from respected persons that all suggest/accept the idea of having a context menu on the star (as suggested by this bug and bug 506925). (Bug 428304 was rightly rejected because it wants a delete action triggered by right-click, which was clearly a problematic approach, and people said context menu would be the right (pun intented) approach.)

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Interactive Mockup (V2b) of proposed context menu for yellow star

Revised Interactive Mockup (V2b) of star button contextual menu.

(In reply to comment #0)
IMO "Bookmark this page" should NOT be in the favicon's context, as that's star button functionality. But I like the idea of Seamonkey Bug 110731 (implement context menu for "shortcut icon" to allow working with the icon image file):

1) Favicon context menu:
Page Info...
--- separator ---
View Shortcut Icon...
Copy Shortcut Icon
Save Shortcut Icon...
Shortcut Icon Properties...

Perhaps adding the 4 sections of Page Info could be considered: General..., Media..., Permissions..., Security..., 
Similarly, there could be more or less actions for the shortcut icon, the minimum would be "View Shortcut Icon" which provides indirect access to all the other image-related commands.

2) RSS Icon: (I'm not into these, so I don't know)
> add as live bookmark
> view preview of feed
> add to *default*

With star icon, should use existing menu commands, and needs two different menus for bookmarked / non-bookmarked pages, as proposed in this attachment (interactive mockup version 2b; cf. bug 506925).

3a) Blank star icon context menu (for non-bookmarked page):
Bookmark this page...
Organize Bookmarks... (cf. comment #0, I really like that, as a power user :))
[/Remove This Bookmark/]         (where brackets indicate disabled)

3b) Yellow star icon context menu (for bookmarked page):
*Edit This Bookmark...*
Show This Bookmark in Library...
Remove This Bookmark

4) History drop-down:
Show all History...
Remove This Page From History
View Other Pages Tagged With *tags this page is tagged with*

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Confirming per comment 3.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

context menu exist where they make sense (for exampe page-action icons now have a context menu), I don't think we need a bug about adding context menus without a specific of what should be inside them and why those options should be in a context menu.