720620 - Updating existing bookmarks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 983750

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[micha]

About improving bookmarks. Sometimes bookmarks get outdated. How do you update ? You find the actual page, copy URL, open bookmark properties, clear the old URL and paste the new.
How many steps !
How about: You pick up the actual pages URL by mouse (dragging the little identifier icon), drag it into the bookmarks, and drop it onto the bookmark you want to update.

It requires a little change in how the mouse dragging triggers the 'position focus': By now, a thin line appearing between bookmarks (not folders) indicates where the mouse-carried icon will be dropped. Folders, on the other hand, are focussed by highlighting.
So, how about hovering exactly over a (single-URL) bookmakr will highlight this like a folder, and when you release / drop the mouse there, this bookmark will be updated.

There is one draw-back: If you accidently do it. There are 2 solutions: (1) Make the thin line more visible, maybe larger, maybe some color effect, and most important, make it as wide as the whole dropdown (it's not like that here, with ff9). And (2) to be on the safe side, you could add an 'Undo changes' option to the bookmark right click menu (which only shows up, if that bookmark was updated recently).

So far. Good luck and thx for the great browser !!

Comment 1

[micha]

And (3) there could be a popup asking 'Update this bookmark ?' then there's no need for any 'Undo' action.

Comment 2

[micha]

By the way, i did not mention the other way to update, by replacing a bookmark by the new one (i.e. deleting the old) but that's still several steps, compared to my one-step proposal.

It should be added that manually updating is not the #1 choice anyway. I seem to remember that add-onns exist that update all bookmarks according to some config options and heuristics. But think about how it works in the real world: People just do not use tons of bookmarks anymore, they go by search portals, and besides that, have only a few. Users won't install an addon just for these few. But since these few are really important, updating may be worth to enhance.

So i wonder how ff could support that. And here is the other idea:

If an URL was called by bookmark, and does not exist (404 or any other error) or gets redirected, then ff could inform the user (in HTML page) about the fact, like:

"The page you requested dopes not exist anymore" or "will redirect you to XYZ"and "Firefox could try to update your bookmark to one of these choices: <list of choices with checkboxes> Do you want firefox to update your bookmark ?" and there could be buttons:
[Update Bookmark] [Preview] [Delete Bookmark] [Get me out here].

How would that list of choices for possible new targets be derived? 
First choice is the top level domain (if that still exists). Then, the old URL could be shortened, piece by piece, cutting off (1) any data stuff (like &bla) and (2) path elements from the end, and that address could be silently checked in the background, to see if it returns an error. There would be a limit of say max. 3 proposals in that HTML page of firefox but those are guaranteed to exist.

The 'Update?' dialog needs to be a HTML page because that would work 'multiple', even when you opened all bookmarks of a folder and there is more than one invalid.

The 'Preview' button would open the checked (selected by checkbox) URL in a separate window (really, really not a tab) and it would be totally great if i could navigate there to some sub-page and then say 'use this', maybe by right-click menu, or by clicking some button, but i guess that's too difficult to implement.

If, by any chance, the top level domain does not exist anymore, firefox would do nothing, just the standard 404 message.

This is just a quick brainstorming, maybe it's not worth the effort, you may decide. Well, i proposed to implement tags into bookmarks several years ago, and some 2 years later that really was done. Maybe others had the same idea. 

But anyway, even if bookmarks are rarely used today, they are incredible useful to some users (like me) and you would be amazed to know what i am doing with that inbuilt 'database'. For example, my bookmarks determine which domains are offline-cached forever, or for the period of time that they are tagged with. This way, i can surf many things on my laptop on the road (offline), like Wikipedia, and yet the cache is rather smart with few junk. So, i use bookmarks to control another database.

In my case, that is the wwwoffle daemon, but basically it could be the internal ff cache too. But that's another story.

Enough for this year :) hth

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Consolidating bookmark update requests into one.