Closed Bug 865441 Opened 11 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Can lose access to bookmark star by disabling bookmarks toolbar

Categories

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

23 Branch
x86_64
Windows 7
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: dsmith, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:23.0) Gecko/20130424 Firefox/23.0
Build ID: 20130424030917

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to 'break' the UI (ie: lose access to a customized button):

1) Have the bookmarks toolbar active.
2) Have the new bookmark star/menu element (4/24 nightly or later)
3) Customize position of the star.  Default position is bad (menus expand to the right; putting the menu on the far right of the screen is awkward to use).  Choices are:
3a) To the left of the Back button.  Decent enough, but gets in the way of normal browsing, slightly.  Would like a better option, if possible.
3b) At the left end of the bookmarks toolbar.  Convenient position, doesn't get in the way of navigation buttons, and contextually relevant.
4) Choose 3b, above.
5) Open the bookmark menu and (accidentally?) click the very first menu item: View Bookmarks Toolbar.



Actual results:

Congratulations, the toolbar is gone, with no immediately obvious way to get it back, along with the entire primary bookmarks UI element.  If you go to the Firefox menu, under Bookmarks, the ability to restore the bookmarks toolbar isn't there.  If you open the Library window by clicking on Bookmarks, there's no option from there either.  It's actually in the secondary menu of Options (don't click the Options button itself; that opens up a different dialog entirely).

Now, given that you had to customize the toolbar to reach this state, you might also note that you can reenable the bookmarks toolbar via the context menu.  However that's not terribly memorable, and Australis is making customization a toolbar button, so one wouldn't actually even encounter the context menu option at all once that's put in.

The most logical place to restore it from would seem to be the Bookmarks menu in the Firefox menu, however I'm also given to understand that there's a proposal to remove that as well.  Lacking any info on further changes, good luck getting it back at all at this point.

Note that this doesn't violate point #3 of my 'breakage' list (do not allow hidden toolbars to be the target of customization); the bookmarks toolbar was (and was intended to be) visible at the time of customization.  It's also not necessarily a flaw in the basic design; being able to turn the bookmarks toolbar on and off is perfectly reasonable.  Given the current Australis proposal, one might expect that the 'fix' would be to prevent the user from moving the star onto the bookmarks toolbar.  However that's solving the wrong problem, and merely makes it annoying for users to make said adjustment.



Expected results:

The problem is that you can turn off the toolbar that the UI element *currently resides on*.  Therefore the simplest and least troublesome solution would be to disable the menu item that activates/deactivates the bookmarks toolbar if the button is itself on that toolbar.
See also bug 865668.
Component: Untriaged → Toolbars
Since the change to the bookmark star was backed out, marking this as now being invalid (or someone can change that if there's a better status for it).  Can reopen this if it gets reimplemented with the same problem.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
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