870659 - Ongoing/active/current downloads should always appear first in the download manager, and finished/completed/done below

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[t8av]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20130409194949

Steps to reproduce:

I was downloading many files. One of the files was large and it took long for it to be downloaded. The other ones were very small and were downloaded quickly.

I was trying to find the large file download (which was still active) in the download manager.


Actual results:

It was very difficult for me to find the active download in the download manager.

Many downloads that were already finished, appeared first while the active download was somewhere at the bottom of the list.



Expected results:

Active download should always appear first in the list of the download manager, and only after that the rest of the downloads sorted by time when they started downloading.

Comment 1

[t8av]

This feature should be applied also to the smaller drop-down download manager in the menu panel (the one with the title "display the progress of ongoing downloads").

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

This is more an enhancement than a bug.

Comment 3

[t8av]

Its a bug since you cannot find your ongoing downloads in the list.

(I refer mostly to the in the download manager in the menu panel - the one with the title "display the progress of ongoing downloads").

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

She said it's an enh request cause it was not intended originally to work as you requested, so it's not something "unexpected". It may be evaluated for change as an enhancement though.

Comment 5

[:Paolo Amadini]

This bug is about finding an in-progress download when other, more recent downloads have completed.

This is a valid concern, but I don't think the suggested solution is the best one. Changing the order of downloads in the panel dynamically, by putting the in-progress downloads first, improves this use case but has the opposite effect on another valid use case, that is finding the downloads that have just completed and you may want to open.

In fact, I'd also say that the most actionable downloads are the completed ones rather than the in-progress ones.

Having many downloads is a relatively rare use case, compared to doing one or two downloads at a time, despite for the most technical users it may be different. The interface devoted to users that do many downloads is the Library (Show All Downloads), rather than the Downloads Panel.

I think that a better way to improve this case would be to keep the natural order in the Downloads Panel and the Library window, but provide a filter in the Library window to show only the in-progress or only the completed downloads (for example, they could be activated by a tab at the top or a predefined subfolder on the left).

Comment 8

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

Changing qe-verify? to qe-verify+.