861576 - firefox bookmark library editor now forces a cursor into the list

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Perry Wagle]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20130326150557

Steps to reproduce:

Edit my bookmarks with the "bookmark library" (show all bookmarks) editor.


Actual results:

Now (with ff20, didn't happen in ff19) each list of bookmarks has the cursor placed on the first bookmark in the *unsorted* list of bookmarks.  If you change the sort order, the cursor is maintained, and you are *warped* to that cursor position (now) in the middle of the sorted list.


Expected results:

It used to be (up to ff19) that initially the cursor was absolute position, so that when you changed the sort order, you *stayed* at the top of the list instead of *warping* to some particular *random* bookmark in the list.  Changing lists would clear the cursor.

Given that I didn't select the item at the top of the unsorted list, I don't see that the behavior of *warping* to that random item in the list is desirable for anyone.

So no bookmark should be initially selected.

This messes up a task I do a lot.

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

Confirming this on Windows. The workaround of holding down ctrl while clicking to deselect the first item before sorting is insufficient for repetitive tasks.

Comment 2

[Perry Wagle]

Thing is that other lists don't let you remove the cursor, and those started out without the cursor.  The repeated trend is to change things to make "power" things harder and harder in favor of some dumbed down aesthetic that doesn't let you do complicated things easily any more.  In this case, I'm fighting the placement of the cursor before it get made non-negate-able and can get lost for years in bugzilla.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Whilst I can see this could be annoying mainly because the first item is auto-selected, this is also pretty standard behaviour for list view, e.g. using Mac's Finder it does exactly the same thing with respect to following the selection.

I don't really see us making a change here.