524050 - Places UI: If the user is viewing a bookmarked page, or a places meta page, display an interactive breadcrumb trail in the location bar

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

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

Note: this is a meta tracking bug for UI mockups and discussion of the overall user experience.

This change will likely be controversial, so we should try to get it landed very early in the 3.7 timeline for feedback and testing.  The overall idea is to give the user an interactive breadcrumb trail in the location bar for easier navigation when they are accessing:

-bookmarked pages
-folders of bookmarks
-tags
-history ranges

An attached mockup will detail the exact behavior, but in general here is the rationale:

1) This has a security win, in that a phishing site URL is likely to be drastically different from a breadcrumb trail to the user's bookmark of the site being spoofed (although nearly identical to the sites actual URL).

2) This helps the user build a mental model of where they have stored their bookmarks, and gives them very direct access to their collections.  For instance, if after navigating directly to a particular news site the user read each day, they can now go up a step and access all of the other news sites they like to read.

3) This reinforces that users can enter titles and bookmark folder names into the location bar.  A lot of users currently are aware that they can enter titles, but refuse to for some reason (even though titles are often faster, more memorable, and involve less typing).  I believe this is partly due to established behavior, in that they have been typing in direct URLs for ages, and also because entering a title seems to violate the terms of communication set up by the location bar.  Every time the the location bar addresses the user it displays a URL, so it creates a precedent that only that form of information should be returned (regardless of what it is capable of).

4) URLs are of very little use to the average user.  They aren't particularly memorable or human readable.  For instance, consider the following bookmarks the user has for paying their bills, title versus URL:

"Rent"
"National Water and Power"
"Pacific Gas and Electric"
"Car"
"Cell Phone"

vs.

erentpayer.com/pay/login.html
mynwpsc.com/xwsHome/login.aspx
www.pge.com/myHome/
www.geico.com
www.wireless.att.com/olam/loginAction.olamexecute

fragments like xwsHome and olamexecute are implementation level details that will never be entered into the location bar by the average user, and obfuscate the rest of the information.

Comment 1

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

Note that we should definitely add this as a pref in our actual options UI (not about:config), since a vocal minority of users will likely never accept any form of change to the functionality of the location bar.

Comment 2

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

notes:
- pref doing this for all, folder/range only, none
- caret should activate a menu showing that item's contents

Comment 3

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

mockup from the post: http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20091012-personalWeb/personalURL.png

Comment 4

[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 5

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.