708110 - Enable back the old managers in place of the new Data Manager for cookies, passwords and popups

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[lemon_juice]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20111121 Firefox/8.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.5
Build ID: 20111121045514

Steps to reproduce:

I want to manage my cookies, passwords and permissions in an efficient way like I could do it in Seamonkey 2.0.x and earlier by using:

Tools -> Cookie Manager
Tools -> Image Manager
Tools -> Popup Manager
Tools -> Password Manager



Actual results:

Seamonkey 2.1 and later use a new Data Manager, which lacks many important features found in managers in SM 2.0.x and earlier.


Expected results:

Because the new Data Manager is still far behind in features and usability as compared to the old managers, and the old managers are still in Seamonkey code, the menu items in Tools should open the old managers, which can now be only accessed through chrome:// URLs:

chrome://communicator/content/permissions/cookieViewer.xul
chrome://passwordmgr/content/passwordManager.xul
chrome://communicator/content/permissions/permissionsManager.xul

The new Data Manager can be hidden (or removed) until it matures enough to be usable. Until then, users can use what works better.


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And here follows the longer description and rationale behind this bug report:

The new Data Manager introduced in Seamonkey 2.1 has receieved lots of negative opinions, most of which are justified because managing cookies, passwords and permissions has become more tedious - needing more clicks to do the same thing and some useful stuff has been removed, too. Because the old managers for cookies, passwords and popups are still in current Seamonkey's code I suggest enabling them again through the menus and making the new Data Manager hidden for testing purposes until it matures enough to be equal or better than the old managers.

Here is a list of regressions - things that were possible with the old cookie manager and are impossible or harder to do in the new Data Manager:

1. Selecting multiple cookies from different sites and deleting them with one button press. Easy to do with the old manager but the new manager only allows me to select multiple cookies from a single site. If there are hundreds of sites I want to delete cookies from this is a real pain.

2. Domain search ignores subdomains in the new manager so when I want to find sub.example.com by typing "sub" then I get no results at all. This worked in the old manager.

3. In the new manager I cannot find cookies only from a subdomain. Sometimes I'm interested only in one subdomain and not all subdomains under a domain.

4. Searching within cookie names and values. Not possible at all in the new manager. The old search among cookie names, values, domains and subdomains was very handy. I was able to easily find out what other sites contained my site domain name in their cookies - very useful at times.

5. In the old manager I could order cookies by domain, cookie name or expires date withing all cookies. Now the domains are sorted in ascending order without ability to reverse it, subdomains are missing in the left panel altogether, and sorting within cookie names and expires date works only within one domain.

6. When a cookie changed, the old manager was updated immediately to reflect the change. The new one doesn't refresh, I have to use workarounds like switching to another Data Manager tab and going back again.

7. In the old manager I had a much better overall view of what cookies different sites stored because they were all in one window. Now the cookies are hidden until I click a domain. Plus, I can only select one domain which is a severe limitation.

Most of the above also refer to the password manager. There's another one specific to the password manager:

8. After pressing "show passwords" the passwords are shown only for the selected domain and when I switch to another domain I have to press the button again. The old manager showed passwords for all found domains and for multiple subsequent searches, which was more convenient.

The improvements that the new Data Manager brings are:

1. Ability to group cookies by site

2. "Forget this domain" feature

But these improvements are pretty minor and not really important compared to some essential features that the new manager doesn't have any more. Therefore, I suggest pointing the menus to the old managers, whose code is still there and are accessible through chrome:// urls) and removing the Data Manager - or hiding it so that the developers and testers can access it while the users can use the more functional, traditional managers. Most people don't need the Data Manager in its current state - let's wait till it becomes as useful as the old managers before giving it to the users.

Because any fast progress on improving the Data Manager is unlikely to happen I think it's a good idea to use the old managers as long as they are available, because they are much more useful.

Comment 1

[rexyrexy2]

This kinda makes sense to me, as you could just click on "data manager" to go to data manager. Could there be a pref to control if those items go to data manager or the individual managers to let the user choose?

Comment 2

[Rainer Bielefeld]

I still see the disadvantages of new manager with EN-US SeaMonkey 2.33.1 (German Language pack)  Gecko/20100101 Build 20150321194901 (Classic Theme) on German WIN7 64bit