650755 - Make search choices "spring back"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[earthwormgaz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Hi,

I keep thinking it'd be really nice if Firefox search bar would sort of spring back to a default after searching something I don't use so often.

Example, I search on Google for a band, read a few pages about them, then decide I want to look up a related band on Wikipedia. I change the drop down to Wikipedia search and put in the band name. Then, on the Wikipedia page, I read about a band member I want to Google.

Here's the thing. I select the name, and right click, and it's still set to search Wikipedia, even though, nine times out of ten, I'll want to use the default Google search, so I have to change it. This applies if I'd pasted his name into the search box too.

Can it be made that you choose which search types are "springy", and they bounce back to your default or what you had before after one use?

Hope you like this idea and see the problem I'm on about.

Thanks!

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Actually sounds like a good idea. I have also had this situation a couple of times. Definitely worth asking UX about feedback.

Comment 2

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

We're a bit worried about being accused of simply doing this for revenue (even though it really is a very common mode error in Firefox).  There's more discussion on the mode error aspect in bug 592909.  Something we've also considered is making new tab spring back to the user's default, when the search bar no longer has a global state between tabs, over in bug 565740.

Comment 3

[earthwormgaz]

Hmm, good point, although does it have to spring back to Google? Can the user not set their preferred search engine that it'll default to, Yahoo or Bing or whatever else there is?

Comment 4

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

The user can set a new default search engine, but the unfair argument against us would be that we know they aren't very likely to do that, and we are just doing this to make more money from google.  (ironically, from a business perspective we actually have more of an interest in trying to diversify revenue coming in from multiple engines since this is more stable, so if anything we would be more interested in the reverse).  But anyway, usability wins over revenue concerns, and being spring loaded on new tab feels like the best approach.  If we spring back an engine that the user has already set, they might feel like they lost control.  But a new tab is blank and fresh, so it makes sense that it would return to default.

Comment 5

[earthwormgaz]

Sounds good to me, although don't forget the issue with selecting text in a web page, maybe it should assume my default search engine rather than the one I last selected?

Comment 6

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

>maybe it should assume my default search engine rather than the one I
>last selected?

wow, I didn't even know that it did that.  Filed bug 652487 to make sure we keep that associated with the default.

Comment 7

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

We've solved this with the one off search concept in the URL bar.