829605 - Improvement for the Open with / Save dialog

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[cousteau]

Attachment: Proposed dialog, with the "Save as" tab selected

Right now the "Open with/Save" dialog is a mess, specially the "Open with > Browse" part, in which you have to browse the file system to get the address of the program binary you want to open the file with.

I propose an alternate, more compact design in which the "Save" and "Open with" radio buttons are replaced with 2 tabs.  This way, the "Save" and "Open with" dialogs would be embedded directly under the tabs and wouldn't require an extra window to open.  
See attachments for a mockup.

The "Save" dialog would be the native one for the operating system.  The "Open with" dialog would look more like the one on file browsers.  It would have a list of available applications, headed by the 3 recommended or most used ones, followed by a list of installed applications.  Below this list would be a text box in which the user could directly type a custom command, which is useful if specific arguments are needed (which can't be done with the current interface) or the application is not in the list.  There would also be a "Browse" button as a helping tool to get the path of the executable.

As a bonus, it would be nice to have the application list organized in categories.  The file browser PCManFM for Linux has a pretty nice "Open with" dialog that shows all applications grouped by their categories ("Office", "Tools", "Network", "Multimedia", "Games"...).  For Windows, either the native application chooser dialog (the one on the Windows Explorer) or a replica of the Start menu could be used (maybe with a Search bar included).

Comment 1

[cousteau]

Attachment: Proposed dialog, with the "Open with" tab selected

Comment 2

[cousteau]

Attachment: Proposed dialog, with the "Open with" tab selected

Comment 3

[cousteau]

Comment on attachment 701105 [details]
Proposed dialog, with the "Open with" tab selected

Ignore this attachment; I selected the wrong image on the "Browse" dialog.

Comment 4

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

Thank you Cousteau for your proposal! :)  Maybe this will be taken into consideration in the future.