559521 - Library search results should include containing folder of matching items(s)

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 469421

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[chris]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

Library search results should include the containing folder of matching item(s), i.e. the position of the bookmark in the user's bookmarks folder hierarchy. Users typically search for a bookmark because it's not in the expected location in their hierarchy. Assuming the bookmark is found, without knowing what folder it's currently in, there's no way to judge whether it's actually misfiled, except by guessing or manually wading through the entire hierarchy looking for it. This is impractical for large hierarchies, and is also exactly what using search is supposed to avoid.

A simple solution would be to add a "Containing Folder" column to the Library's list control. Assuming it's an optional column, the change would be additive and should not have any impact on existing behavior, thus no one is likely to object to it.

In addition, opening a bookmark in the Library (via Open or double-clicking it) could open and select the containing folder in the folder navigation pane (and also scroll as necessary to make the containing folder visible). The advantage of this method is that the containing folder is revealed immediately in an intuitive way, without the user needing to customize the list view columns. Presumably the parent folder(s) of the containing folder would also be opened, and this would provide a useful context for refiling, since the bookmark's new location is likely to be nearby, e.g. in a parent folder.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[chris]

An alternative to modifying Open/double-click to open the containing folder would be to add an "Open Containing Folder" item to the Library's list item context menu. This is the menu that currently contains Open, Open in a New Window, Open in a New Tab, Cut, Copy, and Delete. This alternative is just as useful but much simpler to implement and less likely to raise objections since it doesn't affect the existing behavior of Open. Also Windoze users will find it comfortably similar to the "Open Containing Folder" behavior of Windoze Explorer.

Summary of modified proposal: 
1) add optional "Containing Folder" column to Library's list control
2) add "Open Containing Folder" to Library's list item context menu

Comment 3

[polartechdave-bugzilla]

This bug has been reported for many years in many different ways yet still is a problem in Firefox 4.  People create dozens if not hundreds of bug entries all about the same problem but because there proposed solution varies its treated as a new bug, tons of duplicate bug threads all mostly being ignored. Years later people have had to turn to a plug in to fix the bug since no one is fixing it in the product.  Almost 40,000 people have downloaded Show Parent Folder 1.8 by White Alice0775 to fix this since Mozilla doesn't appear to be going to ever address this. I'm no programmer or coder but it seems like this is such an EASY thing to fix with a few tiny lines of code and it makes no sense that many years later from the original dozens of bug reports about the problem nothing has been done.

Comment 4

[Zex]

This is a duplicate. Please vote for the original, to rise its vote count, so this annoying problem finally gets solved:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469421