478269 - "Bookmark this paragraph", remembering scroll position

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

Right now, you can bookmark a site and tag it, but you can't bookmark a paragraph or phrase within the page/site. Often times I find myself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article in wikipedia, for example, where I would like to be able to get back to with the Awesomebar.

It would be useful to be able to go directly to the paragraph that has the information you need.

I was wondering if it is worth considering for, say, Fx3.2.

Comment 1

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Like webslices from IE? This wouldn't really be a bookmark...

Comment 2

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

I just checked, and it's not exactly a webslice.

I just want to be able to quickly reference a specific paragraph in some page, because the paragraph contains the information I want from that page, and because I have tagged that paragraph specifically.

For example: I am looking the Porsche 911 article in wikipedia. Somewhere in that article there's a section pertaining to "996 Series (1997–2004)." And I only care about that. I would like to be able to highlight it, and bookmark and tag that specific paragraph. So later I can go to the awesome bar and type "996" (the tag I chose for it), and go to that wikipedia article and go directly to that area of the page where they talk about that model.

Comment 3

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Well that's possible now with anchors, if the page has an anchor at the given location you can bookmark that.

Comment 4

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

One of the good things about Firefox is that you can often find an add-on to do what you want if Firefox doesn't do it already.  There are several in this case, and a well known example is Clipmarks:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1407

Comment 5

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

I wonder if we should consider maintaining the scroll position when you return to a bookmark, not exactly the feature you are requesting (the bookmark still represents as page), but would make it easier to get back to the part you were looking at when you left.

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to comment #5)
That might be a good idea.  Maybe we could store scroll position as an annotation, being careful to save it on bookmark backup.  My only concern is cases where the position is accidental and has no correlation to your interest in the page, or when the position was relevant to you at one point but no longer.  Especially for often visited bookmarks.  (Think the front page of www.nytimes.com.)  Persisting in those cases might be annoying or disorienting.

Comment 7

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

Perhaps it could be an option, like a check box, in the bookmark-this-page dialog, so you can "paragraph in this bookmark" or something along those lines.

Comment 8

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

>Especially for often visited bookmarks.  (Think the front page of
>www.nytimes.com.)  Persisting in those cases might be annoying or disorienting.

Maybe monitor how the scroll position changes over time, and only preserve it when you don't regularly revisit the page, or scroll position changes a lot?

As an aside, it would be potentially useful for us to track and record how much you scroll on a page as in indication of active interest.

Comment 9

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

I don't think this is wontfix, but I also don't think we want to make this a default feature of bookmarking or something that happens with a checkbox.

Instead, I'd propose that we create a system where if we want to bookmark within a page, a user can right click at a spot and say "bookmark this spot" which would create a bookmark that returns to just that spot. This function could replace the existing "Bookmark This Page" entry on the context menu.

Comment 10

[Jesse Ruderman]

Ancient discussions along similar lines: bug 103118, bug 159716.

Comment 12

[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

Comment 13

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

The NYtimes.com has taken something like this to another level: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source/#p[WtEIyw],h[LNITwr,AltBau,1,WtEIyw,TccIth,2]

And it's kind of awesome what they did.