560305 - Remove "Open in Sidebar" feature

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1452645

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P3)

Description

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

It is unclear if anyone uses this option. I believe it's been around for a very long time and there are some unfortunate hacks in our code-base supporting this very limited use-case. In addition, the Sidebar as it currently exists is not very useful for content (see bug 406629 for one example why) and has a number of bugs filed against it that are non-trivial to fix.

e.g., bug 451792.

Removing this feature would result in a number of bugs being eliminated and the functionality could be provided by a sidebar extension.

Comment 1

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

also, note that sidebar support has been removed from the location bar for nearly 2 years.

see bug 438526

Comment 2

[YUKI "Piro" Hiroshi]

> Removing this feature would result in a number of bugs being eliminated and the
> functionality could be provided by a sidebar extension.

If there were stable APIs. Will the rebooted Jetpack help us addon authors?

Comment 3

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Is this still wanted?

If this get's fixed, Bug 215175 should probably marked as WONTFIX.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Having come across related bugs that nobody really seemed to care about, I'd support this. We should probably gather test pilot data to verify that very few people use this.

Comment 5

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Having come across related bugs that nobody really seemed to care about, I'd
> support this. We should probably gather test pilot data to verify that very few
> people use this.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Test_Pilot/Test_Proposals/Bookmarks_in_Sidebar

Comment 6

[[not reading bugmail]]

There are only 2 places I see this UI: 

1) under a bookmarks properties dialog 
2) the library select a bookmark, a bookmarks lower right pane under view more.  

Back in the day of Iframes ruled the web I think it made sense as a way of navigating: ie left pane's opened links in the right pane, or sidebar vs content area, but there has to probably be very little use cases existing now.

Comment 7

[Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking]]

If this is ever done, Ctrl+B may be used to toggle bookmarks toolbar.

Comment 8

[Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking]]

Also an "Open as App tab" feature may be added.

Comment 10

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

Attachment: Patch v0.1 (WIP)

I took a couple minutes to start killing this but it will probably fall off my radar so I'm uploading what I'd done so far. This is really only the first half of killing this... rel=sidebar will no longer open up the bookmark dialog, and that dialog when opened from the sidebar now doesn't show "[] open in sidebar". So it's future killed (not completely properly) but people's existing sidebar bookmarks will continue to work.

Comment 11

[David McRitchie]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #4)
This is the typical destroy something -- make it so it doesn't work in keyword shortcuts (Bug 215175 - bookmark keyword cannot be used to open bookmark in sidebar)[#c3], which is where a reference sidebar really works,  and then say nobody is using it because the place where it really makes sense to use has been destroyed, then ask for a test [#c4] to prove that nobody is using it.

Comment 12

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The suggestion that we broke something intentionally to later justify removing it is ludicrous. It broke and wasn't fixed because few people care about it, and few people care about it because few users use it. That's not the kind of code we want to continue to have to maintain.

I'm sorry if removing it will be annoying to you, but I hope you'll understand that when you have a user base as large as ours, a feature that 0.05% of users use will have ~200 000 users (I'm not saying these particular numbers apply to this situation, but I bet they're not off by an order of magnitude). The economics of keeping things working for that 0.05% of users at a cost to the other 99.95% just don't work. This kind of scale means that upsetting people by removing things is unavoidable, unfortunately.

Comment 14

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking] from comment #7)
> If this is ever done, Ctrl+B may be used to toggle bookmarks toolbar.

Fwiw, this bug is different from removing bookmarks sidebar and history sidebar, this should first concentrate on removal of "open in sidebar" and AddPanel() features and the connected files.  The bookmarks/history sidebar removal is another interesting thing to do in future, but likely, before removing sucky grouped history, we first need a decent history search in-content page (or in-content awesomebar)

Comment 15

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

What should happen for the test pilot to move forward?

And is it absolutely necessary? Given the all-but-nothing feedback we get for such a buggy feature, I think we can assume this is one of the rare cases where a feature removal won't result in any sort of buzz. It's nothing like live bookmarks, for example (More over, unlike "persistent-livemarks", this it should be quite easy to implement it as an addon).

On a related note, e10s is going to require quite a rewrite of nsContextMenu.js, which supports the sidebar, or at least pretends to. It would be nice to rewrite it under the assumption that the context menu is always used for the one and only browser element.

Comment 16

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I don't think Test Pilot will get us useful data here (and we don't currently have any ways to easily run test pilot studies).

It does seem like e10s will force our hand, so I support removing support for arbitrary content in the sidebars.

Comment 17

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Cool.

Comment 18

[Stephan Sokolow]

(In reply to :Gavin Sharp (email [e-mail]) from comment #16)
> I don't think Test Pilot will get us useful data here (and we don't
> currently have any ways to easily run test pilot studies).
> 
> It does seem like e10s will force our hand, so I support removing support
> for arbitrary content in the sidebars.

Too bad. It really has potential as a way to do a Win8-style uneven split between primary content and a site's portrait-mode mobile version.

...of course, what do I know. I'm one of those dinosaurs who:
- Uses RSS Icon in Awesomebar to have an at-a-glance indication of whether a feed exists
- Had to use the Classic Theme Restorer extension to regain my addons toolbar so I could have a place (which is easy to hide/show with Ctrl+/ ) for bookmarklets like "WayBack" and various sidebar bits and bobs .

Comment 19

[Dwight Stegall]

(In reply to Michael Kohler [:mkohler] from comment #3)
> Is this still wanted?
> 
> If this get's fixed, Bug 215175 should probably marked as WONTFIX.

Yes I still want it. I use it everyday for loading in personal files with info I use on the web, IRC, and working on my website. I also use to load in set up files for Firefox for when I first install it. Firefox is the only browser that makes it easy to access the sidebar. Internet Explorer has two sidebars but you need JavasScript to open them. If you remove it I will have to dump Firefox for a clone. I don't want to do that.

I also use Live Bookmarks everyday. I hate news readers. They slow me down too much.

Comment 20

[Dwight Stegall]

Yes I still want it. I use it everyday for loading in personal files with info I use on the web, IRC, and working on my website. I also use to load in set up files for Firefox for when I first install it. Firefox is the only browser that makes it easy to access the sidebar. Internet Explorer has two sidebars but you need JavasScript to open them. If you remove it I will have to dump Firefox for a clone. I don't want to do that.

I also use Live Bookmarks everyday. I hate news readers. They slow me down too much.

Comment 21

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

This is a feature that we use to localize SUMO documentation, video tutorial here:
https://youtu.be/r8krrF-nroo?t=175

It would be sad to see it go as this would make our localizers less productive.

Comment 22

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

I use the hell out of it myself, but I bet that both my use cases and SUMO localization would be well-served - and probably better served - by an addon like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs/