666799 - Paste & Go is uninformative, may show an excerpt of what is being pasted

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[David Regev]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

Labelling this context menu command ‘Paste & Go’ or ‘Paste & Search’ has several problems:

1. Instead of actually telling the user what will be done, it construes the command as a sequences of two other commands. This requires that you first understand those two other commands, while it also requires you to remember what’s in the clipboard.

2. It is inconsistent with the rest of Firefox and most other interfaces, because it’s rare to see a command worded as a sequences of two other commands. It makes me wonder, ‘Are the other two commands so inefficient that we need a separate command to put them together as a workaround?’

3. Paste & Search is inconsistent with a similar command: if I select ‘Bugzilla@Mozilla’ at the top of this page and right-click, I see ‘Search Google for "Bugzilla@Mozill…"’. If, on the other hand, I copy that text and right click in the Search bar, I just see ‘Paste & Search’. Both commands are identical, so the labels should be identical.

4. ‘Paste’ is misleading because it’s not just pasting, but replacing the entire text of the Location/Search bar and then pasting. This confusion has led to several bug reports, including bug 616678 and bug 628008.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
I expect the command to tell me exactly what it will do.

In the Location bar, if there’s a URL in the clipboard, the context menu should show this:
	Go to <URL>
Where <URL> is replaced with the URL in the clipboard, truncated to a set length. If the copied text is not a URL, or if the we’re in the Search bar, the command should be:
	Search <selected search engine> for <copied text>
This should be identical to the command for selected text on a page (and should ideally reuse the same code).

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> In the Location bar, if there’s a URL in the clipboard, the context menu
> should show this:
> 	Go to <URL>
> Where <URL> is replaced with the URL in the clipboard, truncated to a set
> length. If the copied text is not a URL, or if the we’re in the Search bar,
> the command should be:
> 	Search <selected search engine> for <copied text>
> This should be identical to the command for selected text on a page (and
> should ideally reuse the same code).

The proposed Solution for non-URL does not work for e.g. Keyword bound String Searches:

* given Bugzilla Search with KW "Bug"
* Clipboard Content has "Bug 666799"

This would result in "Search Google for Bug 666799" in the Context Menu. Weird.

Comment 2

[David Regev]

> The proposed Solution for non-URL does not work for e.g. Keyword bound
> String Searches:
> 
> * given Bugzilla Search with KW "Bug"
> * Clipboard Content has "Bug 666799"
> 
> This would result in "Search Google for Bug 666799" in the Context Menu.
> Weird.

Yes, that should be taken into account. It should say ‘Bugzilla’ there instead of ‘Google’.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.

Comment 4

[David Regev]

Attachment: Chrome displaying the suggested feature

I recently noticed that Chrome currently has my requested feature. This is, therefore, parity-chrome.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

We are working on an experimental more discoverable solution in Bug 1842230 to visit URLs in the clipboard, though I think it's worth doing something here to clarify what may be the effect of picking Paste and Go.
There's a lot of edge cases to handle though to recognize if what's in the clipboard is a url or a search, and because the context menu is synchronous, while that decision making in the Address Bar is asynchronous, we can't just rely on the existing code.
That means we could hit a lot of cases where we show the wrong action (a search, and then instead the address bar handles it as a url, or a url and then the address bar handles it as a search).

For obvious cases though, when the clipboard contains a well-formed URL, we could at least show the origin.
For other cases, maybe we could show an excerpt from the clipboard?
There's potentially privacy implications, if the user accidentally discloses something in the clipboard during a presentation for example, for which there should be a way to disable the feature for a profile.

There is no Paste & Search, afaict, Paste and Go will just let the Address Bar handle the string as it see fit.

Comment 6

[David Regev]

I checked Chrome, and I couldn’t find any protections against revealing passwords (at least on Linux). It just shows “Paste and search for "blablabla…".

It might be possible to mark a password copied from Firefox’s password manager as private.