525558 - [faceted search] Add "Find" bar functionality to search results tab

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

One of the reasons why I don't like that first "search all messages" result tab is that it is currently so extremely non-versatile. You're seeing a couple of result messages, but there's nothing you can do with them, except manipulating facets, and clicking on the subject to view and act upon the msg in the thread pane list mode tab. The first result tab is also hard to parse, visually, especially after clicking on "More..." button several times to see more messages in short preview (we really need a "Show all" button here...).

There is a lot of things to be desired to improve this, but here's one which is a low-hanging fruit and it's so basic that I almost fell off my chair when I realized it's not there:

- Implement "Find" bar functionality, like in FF or in TB msg preview.

What I see on the result page is mostly web-style text, and the least I can expect of such an alien is that this text (including subjects, persons etc.) is accessible for manual searching.

I imagine that technically this shouldn't need more than a few lines of code, add a listener for Ctrl+F command and thus hook the existing find bar functionality onto this page.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

roland, joe, have you seen this in gsfn or mozillazine?

It makes sense from a workflow POV. Therefore, cc: Bryan. Although, ability to refine search results via narrower query (i.e. beyond the current facet choicse) might be more useful?

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

This (or something like it) would be great to get.  Given our current 3.1 criteria that blockers need to:

a) make the upgrade experience from TB2 very painful for a large number of users

or 

b) be a new, reproducible, severe quality issue (eg dataloss, frequent crashes)

this isn't a blocker, but marking as wanted+.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thomas, are you still feeling the same about this? If so, can you clarify by giving a step by step real world example?

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #3)
> Thomas, are you still feeling the same about this? If so, can you clarify by
> giving a step by step real world example?

I think comment 0 is quite clear.
As a matter of principle, any larger amount of text content must be searchable, that's what computers are for. Why read the whole thing if Ctrl+F and typing search word + Enter can do?

While you are certainly right that filtering options to reduce the result set might be helpful, that's much harder to realize, both conceptually and technically.

Here I'm talking about a brute-force method of searching what I see on my gloda results tab, loads of textual info.

Use cases are unlimited, because searching text on page mimics quick filtering, but without losing context by changing result set.

E.g.

1) Global search for "find bar" to narrow down on this bug.
2) Ctrl+F for any of the following:
a) search "bugzilla" to see if that folder is on the folders list, then press Enter on selection to set folder condition
b) search "Wayne" to see if he's among the contributors
c) search "global" or "facet" to see if there's anything which relates to global search
d) search "functionality" to see if that word is in subjects shown, I just remembered that's what I had on the bug title

The bottom line is that the facet search results page is totally keyboard-inacessible, and very hard to access at all. Searching and selecting text on a web-style page is among the minimum standards of keyboard accesibility. F7 for caret browsing also seems to fail. Also contextual menu for copy and paste. This page is a total alien both in layout and functionality, compared to the rest of TB, very poorly designed and not practical.