912296 - Redundant home screen data

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Awesomescreen, defect)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Attachment: History

"Bookmarks" shows my top sites. 

"History" starts off showing my top sites. 

Can we do better than showing the exact same data?

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Attachment: Bookmarks

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Hmm.. Bookmarks only shows you top bookmarks. History shows your top sites. In some cases, they'll probably be the same.

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Richard has all of his "Top Sites" bookmarked. I only have 1 bookmarked "Top Site" visible with 4 more a few pans down the page.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I'm not really sure anything is actionable here. We don't want to remove bookmarked sites from History, right?

Thinking a bit, I suppose we could remove bookmarks from History, since we will also sho up in the awesomescreen list as I type. That's the place where we certainly want all types to be displayed.

Comment 5

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Here are a few ideas, stepping back from the current splits. (Ideation first!)

Lest this sound really negative, I like the feel and detail interaction of the new home screen; I just want it to stop giving me irrelevant entry points. Without strong user research suggesting that the vast majority of Firefox users on Android want their top six (desktop!) bookmarks right in their face every time they try to open a tab, I think we have a lot of opportunity for incremental or discontinuous improvement.


Ideas -- some or all of:

1. Start the history view in time-based mode, and start in History rather than Bookmarks. This might be a good trivial first step. Remember, we already know that 50% of desktop Firefox users _don't use bookmarks at all_. It might be higher or lower on mobile, but 50% is a lot. Starting in your bookmarks seems like a bad default, especially if those top sites are only picked from your sparse and non-personalized default bookmarks. Nobody wants a big thumbnail of our support site every time they try to open a tab.

2. Have a separate Top Sites view. This makes bookmarks a navigational system (perhaps with search?) and history a temporal system, with a separate entry point for the recommendation part. Splitting our recommendations between two different views, using two different kinds of display (history = list, bookmarks = six-way split) is confusing, and well, do you remember every site you have bookmarked, and thus where you might look for a suggestion? Minimize surprise. If we're trying to recommend, use everything, at least by default. Split along the navigational axis (time/saved for later/smart), not a hodgepodge.

3. Allow the Top Sites view to be more customizable (a la Safari's "Top Sites", or the Opera speed dial) or get rid of it unless we can make it delightful. Right now it's full of bookmarks I don't need to have in my face all the time -- they're synced from my desktop -- but my only real customization option is to pin one of the ones I don't care about, and I can't get it out of my face without removing the bookmark!

4. Let me pick where about:home starts me. I'd opt to have it start ready to type, or in time-based history; most of my new-tab activity is to type a search. This might be as simple as remembering where I was last time.

Comment 6

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I guess another way of looking at this:

* People who don't use bookmarks won't have these two sets the same... but they also won't get any utility out of the Top Bookmarks entry point.

* People who do will probably have an overlap.

Comment 7

[:Margaret Leibovic]

The design here has changed, and we no longer have a "Most visited" section of the History tab, so I think we should just close out this bug.