646277 - Add a "search using ..." context menu to search bar go button

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1088660

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Harsh86]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

One thing that has always annoyed me about the search bar is that if I want to search using a non default search engine in the search bar, I have to switch the current search engine and then do my search. You also have to mentally remind your self to switch it back to the default, because if you don't you're just going to confuse your self later. "Huh?! Why has Wikipedia opened instead of Google?! ... Oh, right."

I'm not the only one, I've asked other Firefox users and they do the same thing. Worst still, I once did this on my family pc. I got phone call the next day while at work from my Mother asking me why the Internet isn't working? She explained that for reason Google's broken! Seriously.

Well that does it. Annoying and a usability nightmare for the computer illiterate. This must be fixed!

I have a wip patch. Will post soon.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Harsh86]

Attachment: Add a search with context menu

This patch does the following:

* Adds a search with context menu to the search bar go button.
  Note: I've reused the engine tooltip strings for the menu's strings. Hope this is fine. The wording is exactly what I needed ("Search using"), but it still feels like I'm cheating here.

* Allows you to drag text over the search bar go button, the context menu opens and you can drop it over a search engine and it will open in that search engine.
  I've made sure this feature is well polished and works well, for example: there are timers to slightly delay the opening and closing of the menu. This is similar to how the bookmark folders work when dragging objects between them.


I'd like some feedback on the bug and patch. BTW this is my first bug and my first patch so be nice :-)

Comment 2

[Harsh86]

Attachment: Add a "search with" context menu to searchbar V1.1

Turns out I was working with a slightly stale copy of search.xml and my patch was removing one of Ensan's patches. Sorry still getting used to hg.

Comment 3

[Harsh86]

I managed to get a first pass review off Gavin on IRC. He's asked me to do the following:

 * Split the patch into 2 parts, one for each sub-feature.

 * Create a help function for creating a searchbar engine menu item. To be shared across RebuildPopup(), RebuildPopupDynamic() and createSearchwithMenu()

 * Get UI-Review from the UX guys

I'm working on the first two, but ill post some screenshots so I can get UI-Review in the meantime.

Comment 4

[Harsh86]

Attachment: "Search using" context menu

Comment 5

[Harsh86]

Attachment: "Search using" menu drag behaviour

Comment 6

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

Comment on attachment 523314 [details] [diff] [review]
Add a "search with" context menu to searchbar V1.1

Looks like there are pending review comments to address, and UI-review may mean making additional changes, so cancelling this review request for now.

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Harsh86 from comment #0)

> One thing that has always annoyed me about the search bar is that if I want
> to search using a non default search engine in the search bar, I have to
> switch the current search engine and then do my search. You also have to
> mentally remind your self to switch it back to the default, because if you
> don't you're just going to confuse your self later.

This use case is now supported with the one-off UI we added in Firefox 34.

Comment 8

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 523579 [details]
"Search using" context menu

Dropping old ui-review request on long-closed bug.