801043 - Fix share menu ordering (currently neither ordered by frequency nor alphabetically)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20121012030610

Steps to reproduce:

The share menu should be either ordered by frequency or alphabetically. Currently it has Bluetooth at the top on a device that has never had Bluetooth on, next is Messages, Notes (an app that's never been opened) and then Twitter before Google+. In short the ordering is rather haphazard.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

The ordering is likely system applications followed by user-installed applications and is likely using Android's sort based on a preferred order that might change over time

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/GeckoApp.java#662

Comment 2

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/ResolveInfo.html#preferredOrder

"Order of result according to the user's preference. If the user has not set a preference for this result, the value is 0; higher values are a higher priority." Kind of vague, but that is how the ordering is setup right now.

Comment 3

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Sriram/Mark, thoughts?

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

Yup the order isn't changing based on frequency/preference for me. It could just be me/my device though.

Comment 5

[Paul [pwd]]

OK, so I've been testing all this time and the order definitely isn't changing.

Comment 6

[Paul [pwd]]

In the time I've been trying to get Tweakdeck and Whatsapp to the top on Firefox, a Quikpic update came out that changed their share menu from alphabetical to frequency and as such, I've quickly managed to get WhatsApp to the top of that list.

Comment 7

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

Attachment: Sort "Share" list alphabetically

I'd like to see the list sorted alphabetically - I tried several other apps that have a "share" option, and they all sort alphabetically.

Here's a patch to change the sorting.

Comment 8

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

The order by preference doesnt seem to work. Is it ok to change it to show alphabetically?

Comment 9

[Paul [pwd]]

If we're unable to fix this, can we not punt over to the system? It'd look a lot more professional than an alphabetical list given that most modern apps are sorting by use-frequency.

Comment 10

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

(In reply to Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram] from comment #8)
> The order by preference doesnt seem to work. Is it ok to change it to show
> alphabetically?

Yeah, I agree with Paul here, our end goal should be to surface the most commonly used share items first. I would even go one step further and suggest a model similar to the Gallery app, which shows the first 3-4 most commonly used items, and hides the rest behind a "More" row.

Comment 11

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I've filed Bug 825799 to cover using ShareActionProvider, which does all the magic ordering for you, and even provides the fun "most recent" bar.

Also, sure would be nice to start with Firefox Sync shuffled to the top.

Comment 12

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

Comment on attachment 693993 [details] [diff] [review]
Sort "Share" list alphabetically

The fix in bug 809790 removes the custom Share menu code, which results in the same behaviour as this patch did anyways.

Comment 13

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Mark - Sorry for the churn. We plan on getting the menu back into a later release, once we figure out a good plan to work around these kind of bugs.

Comment 14

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

No problem! I'm happy with the way it is now and will be glad to help test when the menu strikes back.

Comment 15

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

The reason we won't be able to do this is, Android allows apps to store the choosen activities through a history file via ShareActionProvider. (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ShareActionProvider.html#setShareHistoryFileName%28java.lang.String%29).

Comment 16

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

When FHR is no longer taking all of my time, I'd like to hack together something that addresses sharing a little more directly.

Comment 17

[Paul [pwd]]

aaron, can you resolve this fixed please?

Comment 18

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Is it?

Comment 19

[Paul [pwd]]

Yup, we're ordered by frequency now.