646402 - The text "Show all bookmarks" in Firefox menu is misleading

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

The original text "Organize bookmarks" was changed to "Show all bookmarks" in bug 592908. While I understand the reason behind this choice (uniformity with the History menu), I think this is creating an usability issues.

Since the release of Firefox 4 we're receiving on the Italian support forum a lot of complaints for this change: people don't understand that a menu called "view" let you "manage/organize" things, the typical question is "Now how can I backup my bookmarks since there's no "Manage bookmarks" menu?".

This seems to involve also Firefox in English, e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/my/questions/796729 (but you can find several similar discussions).

Obviously I could change the text in the Italian localization going back to "manage", but I think this matter should be discussed a bit deeper.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

FWIW, I've already seen some bugs filed by users that complained we don't have anymore a bookmarks organizer.

Comment 2

[Guillermo López :willyaranda (probably SLOW response)]

We are getting some reports too in our Mozilla Hispano forum. Nothing big, but the complains are there.

Comment 3

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Alex, is this something UX is open to relabelling?

Comment 4

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

Limi notes that when the text was "organize bookmarks" a set of users were providing the feedback "where are all of my bookmarks?"  Two other considerations:

-even with the ... the command sounds like it is going to take an action on your bookmarks when you hit it
-it's kind of nice to have the internal consistency with "show all history"

while the name change shows up a bit in support requests, I don't think it is causing any more havoc that other types of feature renaming.  Changing it every release would be a problem, so I think we should just stabilize it to the current text.

Comment 5

[fawer]

It's also possible to change bookmarks to "Bookmarks Manager" and history to "History Manager" if you want consistency, but this will cause more string changes.

In regards to consistency: I don't think it's necessary (or useful), as although the bookmarks and history managers are similar, their uses are different. I use the bookmarks menu to modify my bookmarks, because the bookmarks drop-down menu is an easier way to look at my bookmarks. Meanwhile, I use the history manager to look at my history, since the history menu only shows a few items. It's very rare that I want to modify my history. So: bookmarks manager for modification, history manager for browsing.

For modifying my bookmarks, "show all bookmarks" doesn't capture what I want to do. I want to change my bookmarks, not show them. The word "manager" more accurately represents the use of the bookmarks manager.

Of course others may use them differently; just my two cents.

Comment 6

[fawer]

I believe that this bug, 421406, 421609, and 410404 are all dupes of 404084, which was the original bug that resulted in the name change to "Show All Bookmarks".

Comment 7

[Sebastian H.]

+1 for changing this. After countless years of using Firefox and using the "Show All Bookmarks" menu almost daily, I *still* have this irrational fear of ALL MY BOOKMARKS OPENING UP whenever I click this. I can't believe that any consistency issues outweigh this.

Comment 8

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

It now says "Manage bookmarks" everywhere, I think.