890789 - [Australis] On Mac, the bookmarks button should not have a dropdown

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

Split from bug 865199, which became confusing because people were asking for customization options (rather than better defaults) and for weird reasons.

On Mac, the dropdown is redundant with the Bookmarks menu that is part of the always-visible Mac OS X menu bar.  (The menu-bar menu is actually better, since it's a bigger click target and has more space for its menu.)

Since the dropdown is redundant on Mac, it's silly for it to take up space on the main toolbar.  (It also makes the toolbar look unbalanced, but that's a minor thing.)

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

the menu in the button will have slightly different options, I personally disagree on it being redundant, it's our expected point of interaction for bookmarks, the fact the menubar has a duplicate is a minor detail.
I think we should keep the experience coherent across the platforms, it's very easy for an advanced user to hide the dropdown with userChrome.css if he wants, I expect most users to not really care, or expect a coherent experience.
Not sure what you mean by unbalanced, but we are removing the dropdown glyph and replacing it with a proper button, shortly.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

"A proper button"? Does that mean it will be customizable separately from the Star?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

No, I was unclear, I mean it won't have a dropdown glyph but it will have its own icon.  Making it magically split from the button would hurt code maintainability, wherever possible we try to avoid adding magic transforms to the toolbar items, we have enough of those already.
My point stands still, I think the coherency across platforms wins over the will to avoid redundancy by some advanced users, that on the other side have a very easy css option to hide it.  I don't even think we should hide this menu if the menubar is visible on Windows, to avoid magic and confusing changes.  This is my opinion clearly, I'm far from being a UX expert and I didn't get any spec regarding this so far.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

If it has its own icon, why would you need "magic" to let users drag it independently of the Star?  What special thing will happen when they are adjacent?

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

they are intended to act like a single entity for customization and to complete each other, for example the bookmarks list doesn't have a bookmark this page entry anymore since it's connected to the star that covers that functionality.  Having them apart would lose some connections that were nice to give users a more unified point of action for bookmarks (there is still something to do there too).

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I agree with Marco, we shouldn't make the button different nor is is worth the effort to do so.