449801 - Support filtering in popup/images/cookies/addons/passwords exception dialogs via search textbox

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/20080808020649 Minefield/3.1a2pre ID:20080808020649

The dialog for images exceptions (Preferences|Content) should use the new search textbox widget.

Comment 4

[Steffen Wilberg]

So, to repeat, what exactly do you want to filter in these dialogs?

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

similar to bug 327048

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

If you have a lot of added exceptions it will be hard to search for a specific entry. It's most notable if you have entries for several sub domains of a domain. They are not followed by each other. With the search option you can easily see already added entries while adding a new one or just searching for existing entries.

I think it makes sense to add a search field here because there is no other way to get a quick overview about already added exceptions.

Comment 7

[Steffen Wilberg]

Note that the exceptions dialogs let you view, remove and *add* exceptions. They provide a textbox to let you enter sites and add them to a black or white list. 

If you want to filter the list, you need to add another textbox. But that adds complexity for little value. I suggest WONTFIX, that's extension fodder.

Comment 8

[[:Aleksej]]

Currently it is possible to search by the beginning of the URL, but that's not very helpful when you don't know that beginning (e.g. y2.example.com), or when it is ambiguous.

Comment 9

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> If you want to filter the list, you need to add another textbox. But that adds
> complexity for little value. I suggest WONTFIX, that's extension fodder.

Why we should add another textbox? We could use the replaced textbox as filter to only show relevant existing entries from the exception list. So we have a sweet small and combined UI for each operation. Remind that there is no other place to search for existing exception list entries in Firefox! Personally I don't agree that it should be implemented by an extension. It will be a very useful feature which should be in core.

Mike, could you come up with a statement? Thanks.

Comment 10

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

When we are using the search textbox widget here we definitely depend on bug 388811. Adding ref again.

Comment 11

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

why not leave the current state "as is" and instead develop a new widget providing search *and* exception [block|allow|allow for session|etc.] capabilities?

Comment 12

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

We don't need bug 388811 to track any piece of code that could possibly use a type="search" textbox... Using type="search" is also not the essence of this bug, but supporting filtering is.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

So which existing widgets could be used to implement filtering in the exception dialogs? Or do we have to create something new which gives us some more control as already mentioned in comment 11.

Comment 14

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

>uiwanted

This sounds fine, but I would place the search field below the list, as opposed to above it since filtering is a secondary action (kind of like the download manager).  Also, this really isn't a high priority, since very few people even use these lists, let alone have so many items in them that they would need to filter (as opposed to say the list of saved passwords).

Comment 15

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Not at all important, though I'd rather try to figure out how to combine the two textboxes, rather than having two, which would be ugly.

Comment 17

[Candide]

Adding the ability to search on partial or sub-domains, within the exception window,  would be an enhancement. This would also promote better use of exceptions - instead of clearing all exceptions.  

I use the exceptions feature almost daily and find very annoying and time consuming to have to manually find the exception I need in order to change it.

Comment 18

[Alain Knaff]

No matter whether it will stay one textbox (acting both as domain name to block/allow, and as a filter to search through the existing list), or 2 (one for each purpose), or a saner sort order (going right to left, from TLD to domains to subdomains, the way domains are parsed), the absence of this feature is a major deal breaker.

Once you've surfed for a while, the list tends to get huge, and it quickly becomes non-obvious which subdomain a missing cookie belongs to. You may know that you're accidentally blocking cookies of a subdomain under emc.com, but not whether it's sso.emc.com, support.emc.com or something else.

And yes, people do block cookies, and over time, the list gets too huge to be manageable without search or a semantically correct sort.

Please fix this ASAP, and don't spend years agonizing over which of the 3 possible ways to fix it would be the "absolute correct" way. Just pick any of these 3, and change it later if the "graphic designer crowd" revolts.

Personally, I prefer a UI that offers me the features that I need, rather than one that is "sweet small"... An ugly dialog is still preferable over a product which is unusable because of missing functionality, please get your priorities right.

Comment 19

[Alain Knaff]

Sorry to reply to my own comment, but just found a workaround in a sister bug report (#142179) for this:

about:permissions

Nice feature, should be better advertised, because the default way in Edit->Preferences is ****...