599779 - Create a submenu under "Add-ons" for extension menu entries

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[imradyurrad]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100926 Firefox/4.0b7pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100926 Firefox/4.0b7pre

Instead of extensions cluttering up the firefox button, it would be better to have a submenu under "add-ons" designated to extension menus. 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[patrickjdempsey]

Isn't the intention of removing all of the statusbar stuff for extensions to use the Addons bar as their home for launching options and commands?

Comment 2

[imradyurrad]

Not everybody wants a ~5px bar running across the bottom of the screen. To me, the Addons Bar serves the same purpose as the status bar.

Comment 3

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

I am pretty sure that this is WONTFIX, but I'll let Faaborg speak to that. His intention was that Add-Ons could and should add themselves to the Firefox Button in a different top-level space.

Comment 4

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

Setting this to wontfix, the reason is that we want users to be able to quickly access extensions without the need to expand a sub-menu in third or fourth level UI.  This will make the Firefox menu more complex after the user installs a number of extensions, but we believe that this added complexity is worth the efficiency gains.

Moving all of these items to a sub-menu may end up being a popular extension, but it isn't something we want to do in the product itself.

Comment 5

[heraldo]

@Faaborg: Since this is set to wontfix (without convincing arguments imo), shouldn't there be a mechanism in Firefox for removing extension menu items from the Tools menu? Currently the user is at the mercy of the extension developer if he provides a way to remove the item from the Tools menu or not. A lot of extensions just add an entry for accessing their Prefs page, which is useless if the user does not change the prefs after initial configuration. These entries just add clutter to the menus and are not easily removable.

Comment 6

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

Yeah, ideally users would be able to customize extension menu entries just as they are able to customize extension toolbar buttons.

Comment 7

[heraldo]

How / where could this be done in the UI? Something like the Menu Editor* extension approach would probably be overkill.

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/710/

Comment 8

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

ideally the interface would be direct manipulation (dragging objects around and having the other objects move out of the way).  We'll be revisiting customization in Firefox after we ship 4, unfortunately we are really getting down to the wire with getting this release out at the moment.

Comment 9

[heraldo]

Thanks for commenting Alex. Actually, now that there is a dedicated addons bar, shouldn't extensions add their buttons there instead of populating & cluttering the top level of the Tools menu?

Comment 10

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

It really depends on the add-on, and how often they believe that users will need to interact with the provided functionality.