747506 - It is not easy enough to clear all the downloads

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Looks like one needs to find that the "Clear List" is in the context menu of the
download list menu. That is too difficult.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

this was a deliberate choice from UX iirc, btw there is not much need to clear list since the panel contents are per session (ignoring bugs)

Comment 2

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Contents do not seem to be per session to me.

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Yeah, certainly not per session.

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Also, a session can be long, like 6 weeks.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

you keep the same browser session open for 6 weeks?
Btw, this is not supposed to be something most users would do/care-about (once the bug that is not keeping just the session downloads is fixed), so that's a good indication why the option is in secondary ui.

Comment 6

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #5)
> you keep the same browser session open for 6 weeks?
I don't, since I test various cycle collection fixes - which is why I keep the same
session max 1 week or so.
My assumption is that many users, especially when using laptops, just suspend the laptop and
resume. No need to close a browser ever.

Comment 7

[Stephan Sokolow]

I only restart my Firefox when memory leaks or power outages force me to... which means anywhere from once a week to once a month.

It just takes too long to shut down and start up (even with all my tabs loaded on demand) for me to consider doing anything else... especially when my old motherboard had 4GiB of RAM and my new one has 16GiB.

Comment 8

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

If you do not clear the downloads, the Download UI element stays in your browser toolbar, even if there is nothing of interest there any more. So you do need to clear the downloads if you want to declutter your UI...which is now quite a few mouse-clicks extra away.

Comment 9

[Stephan Sokolow]

In my case, I'd actually like the downloads button to be permanently present to the right of the "New Tab" button in the tab bar (to the left of my panorama button) but I'd still like to be able to easily clear the list since there's currently no way to limit the height of the panel to half the screen's height.

Comment 10

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Attachment: Add "Clear" command to the indicator context menu

How about adding a context menu to the indicator itself, as in this patch, so you can clear the list and un-clutter the UI without first opening the panel?

The patch is not complete (no tests, for example), but I welcome any feedback on the approach.  Is adding a new nsIController the best thing to do here?

Comment 11

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Attachment: screenshot of download indicator context menu

Any UX feedback on this idea?  I know it's still not very discoverable, but I think it's a good option if we want to provide this a quick-but-unobtrusive option for users (like me) who just want to get rid of the indicator.

UX questions:
* The current patch re-uses the string from the download panel context menu.  Should we use a different string instead?
* Are there any other items that would be useful in this context menu?
* Is there a different approach that would be more discoverable?

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

actually the panel will just contain the last 3-7 downloads, it's probably not yet worth it to build patches on top of the current broken behavior.

Comment 13

[Stephan Sokolow]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] (away for CONFSL 21-25 June) from comment #12)
> actually the panel will just contain the last 3-7 downloads, it's probably
> not yet worth it to build patches on top of the current broken behavior.

Probably better to make it prune entries which completed more than X time ago when a new download is started.

I generally download 4 things at once and, if I have two long-running YouTube 720p or 1080p downloads in the background, that can easily reach 8 simultaneous downloads since I always download both the 720p and 1080p versions for archival. (Not all of my machines have VDPAU acceleration)

Comment 14

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] (away for CONFSL 21-25 June) from comment #12)
> actually the panel will just contain the last 3-7 downloads, it's probably
> not yet worth it to build patches on top of the current broken behavior.

For my workflow, I don't care how many items are in the list; what I want is to hide the indicator once I've viewed (or otherwise dealt with) my downloaded files.

Comment 15

[Stephan Sokolow]

(In reply to Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck) from comment #14)
> For my workflow, I don't care how many items are in the list; what I want is
> to hide the indicator once I've viewed (or otherwise dealt with) my
> downloaded files.

Then I'm actually the polar opposite to you. Even if there weren't bugs in the show/hide logic, It'd irritate me to have the indicator completely hidden when empty. (It's the quickest way to get to the library browser to access downloads that are no longer in the list)

Comment 16

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>actually the panel will just contain the last 3-7 downloads, it's probably not yet 
>worth it to build patches on top of the current broken behavior.

Too broken to consider patching, but not broken enough to stop it from having landed? The Panel is in Firefox 14 (IIRC?), which means you're not likely to get in significant changes before it gets released.

People are or will be using the product - there's no reason not to fix it.

Comment 17

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #16)
> The Panel is in Firefox 14 (IIRC?), which means you're not
> likely to get in significant changes before it gets released.

The download panel is disabled on the beta and aurora channels; it's enabled only in Nightly.

Comment 18

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck) from comment #14)
> For my workflow, I don't care how many items are in the list; what I want is
> to hide the indicator once I've viewed (or otherwise dealt with) my
> downloaded files.

The point is that current design direction is to have it always visible, so likely this won't help your workflow.  We discussed this quite a bit about this at last work week and that is the cleanest solution for most users.
So, I think I'm leaving this on the backburner for now, until we have the next iteration of the panel interaction in Nightly, then re-evaluate.

Comment 19

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>The point is that current design direction is to have it always visible.

This just landed in Nightly, didn't it :-(

There is no longer any way to tell "all downloads finished, ready to look at" from "nothing happening wrt to downloads", and that's just *terribly* annoying, not to say that that's yet another completely needless icon taking up space.

Comment 20

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

yeah it landed. Though magic-changing buttons are annoying as well, and sometimes confusing for users (see refresh button merging with locationbar, back forward merging when in default position, bookmarks button moving on customize and so on).
I think one way or the other we are going to make someone unhappy.

Comment 21

[Stephan Sokolow]

I think keeping it visible and applying something easy to match to detect state (like a class) is a better default solution since it's simpler to write XUL CSS to hide a specific toolbar button state than to prevent hiding.

Here's an example of what I'm thinking of as it applies to the Video DownloadHelper extension:

http://userstyles.org/styles/19643/downloadhelper-hide-inactive-compact-active

Comment 22

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

So, there are too many different reports here that don't belong to the original topic.

Clear List is currently available in the panel, though the panel contents are limited to 3 entries and cleared with the browser session. Thus its usage is limited. Each entry has also a Remove from history contextual item.

On the other side now the Show All Downloads view has both a Clear Downloads button and a context menu entry.

There's no plan to add further clear buttons around currently.