840981 - The text placeholder in the searchbox should be about CSS selector, not about HTML search

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(DevTools :: Inspector, defect)

Comment 1

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

If we want "Search CSS Selectors" then we need to increase the width of the search box to around 200px.
If we want "Search Selectors", then the current width is alright.

In both the options, I think it becomes less clearer to the user that searching here will return and select an HTML element.

Even though the search box takes CSS selectors as input, its final search result is an HTML element only.

What do you think Paul ?

Comment 2

[Paul Rouget [:paul]]

The icon obviously suggest a "search" functionality. No need to add "search" in the placeholder. What about just "CSS Selector"?

Comment 3

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

(In reply to Paul Rouget [:paul] from comment #2)
> The icon obviously suggest a "search" functionality. No need to add "search"
> in the placeholder. What about just "CSS Selector"?

No, if we want to be consistent with every other placeholder for a search box in the whole Firefox UI. Like the debugger's say "Filter Scripts", Web Console's says "Filter", Inspector's Computed View's say "Search". So basically every placeholder says either to search or to filter.

We can go with "Search Nodes" or "Search Elements" and then add a tooltip to tell that it takes CSS selectors as input ?

Comment 4

[Paul Rouget [:paul]]

(In reply to Girish Sharma [:Optimizer] from comment #3)
> We can go with "Search Nodes" or "Search Elements" and then add a tooltip to
> tell that it takes CSS selectors as input ?

Ok.

Comment 5

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

I suggest "Search Elements" as placeholder and "Search for a CSS selector" as the tooltip. This will also cover the use case that inspector can be used on xul pages and thus "Search HTML" makes no sense there.

@Paul, what do you think ?

Comment 6

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

To toss in another perspective, I did not realize until I saw this bug that the search box expects a CSS selector, and leaving that hidden in a tooltip well probably leave others confused as well.

I would prefer to see "selector" somewhere in the placeholder if possible, though I understand you don't want the box to be too big. Perhaps "Search by Selector" (or "on" / "via" in place of "by")?

Just a suggestion from a outsider's perspective. :)

Comment 7

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

(In reply to J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] from comment #6)
> To toss in another perspective, I did not realize until I saw this bug that
> the search box expects a CSS selector, and leaving that hidden in a tooltip
> well probably leave others confused as well.
> 
> I would prefer to see "selector" somewhere in the placeholder if possible,
> though I understand you don't want the box to be too big. Perhaps "Search by
> Selector" (or "on" / "via" in place of "by")?
> 
> Just a suggestion from a outsider's perspective. :)

I like "Search by Selector", if that does not overflow on Linux (as fonts are bigger there) then we can go with it :)

Comment 8

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

(In reply to J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] from comment #6)
> To toss in another perspective, I did not realize until I saw this bug that
> the search box expects a CSS selector, and leaving that hidden in a tooltip
> well probably leave others confused as well.

The suggestion popup that will soon land make things much more clearer and visible. As soon as the user types any alphabet, some suggestion will show up and he will know that what is the searchbox doing. So I think that this feature should not be hidden anymore then.

Comment 9

[Paul Rouget [:paul]]

Do we still want to fix this?

Comment 10

[Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]]

I am impartial to "Search by Selector" string vs the current. But we might want bug 835896 fixed, if yes, then after that the opinion might change.

Comment 12

[Sami Jaktholm]

Bug 991745 changed the placeholder to "Search with CSS Selectors".