923370 - Find In Page improvements

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Two things I noticed today, trying to search for "Tor" in a Reddit thread:

* We don't let you choose to Match Case.
* We don't let you match whole word only.

The former we already allow on desktop, and should be straightforward. The latter is a very, very common option in desktop apps, but might be additional work.

The biggest trick here would be making the UI work in constrained space. Perhaps a two-size search bar: triggered in large mode with more options, and shrinking to search term and prev/next when the editor loses focus?

Comment 1

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

We could make find in page more of an "action mode" with its own actionbar? and an overflow menu?

Comment 2

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

(In reply to Wesley Johnston (:wesj) from comment #1)
> We could make find in page more of an "action mode" with its own actionbar?
> and an overflow menu?

That was the thing that jumped to mind for me too, yeah. Where the primary action bar controls are: input field, next/prev arrows, and the overflow menu contains more fine grain settings.

Comment 3

[Peter Retzer (:pretzer)]

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #0)
> * We don't let you match whole word only.

For the record: 
Whole word matching is being developed in bug 269442 for Desktop Firefox, which currently has a 2-month-old WIP patch.

Comment 4

[Saurabh Anand [:sawrubh]]

The current UX feels really clunky to me. The fact that the Find in Page toolbar appears at the bottom before the keyboard has appeared, then moves with the keyboard till the keyboard opens up makes it feel not so responsive compared to Chrome's UX where the url bar becomes the search toolbar. Also I don't feel super happy with the look on my Nexus5(4.4.3), the next and previous buttons don't look so modern.

Comment 5

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Perhaps this can be mentored

Comment 6

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Wes, do you know this code well enough to mentor?

Comment 7

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Yeah. This will be fun to do, but probably tricky as well. Currently all of Find-in-page is here:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/FindInPageBar.java

I would leave that code in place but make it not extend a LinearLayout anymore. Instead, it would just be a generic object. In its show() method instead of making itself visible we would call BrowserApp.startActionMode(callback) [1]. The callback [2] would build the "menu" structure when the mode was started. We probably will have to extend that to handle textboxes. Doing that likely requires writing a new MenuItemActionBar [3] that can show as a textbox, but we'd have to look into that a bit more...

[1] http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/BrowserApp.java#2888
[2] http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/ActionModeCompat.java#25
[3] http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/menu/MenuItemActionBar.java

Comment 8

[Saurabh Anand [:sawrubh]]

Any thoughts on Comment 4 regarding the search box moving with keyboard (causing that discontinuity). I guess the button styling is already being looked at by :antlam so ignore that.

Comment 9

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

I agree, it feels pretty darn clunky. 

So what's the plan here though? I'm hearing a lot of ideas/issues in this bug, are we tackling them all here? 

* give users the option to Match Case
* give users the option to match whole word only
* move find bar to the top of the screen
* re-theme find bar as per some of Anthony's recent design work

Comment 10

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

(In reply to Saurabh Anand [:sawrubh] from comment #8)
> Any thoughts on Comment 4 regarding the search box moving with keyboard
> (causing that discontinuity). I guess the button styling is already being
> looked at by :antlam so ignore that.

I like the idea of moving things to the urlbar. That should help fix that up. Is there something I'm missing there?

Sorry, I just assumed that's what this bug was about. If we want to collect bugs here, I'd be fine making it a meta bug. Bug 1005231 is another I'd like to see done.

Comment 11

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to Saurabh Anand [:sawrubh] from comment #4)
> The current UX feels really clunky to me. The fact that the Find in Page
> toolbar appears at the bottom before the keyboard has appeared, then moves
> with the keyboard till the keyboard opens up makes it feel not so responsive
> compared to Chrome's UX where the url bar becomes the search toolbar. Also I
> don't feel super happy with the look on my Nexus5(4.4.3), the next and
> previous buttons don't look so modern.

I agree in that I don't think we should be using a separate toolbar. I think it would be better to use our own action-bar similar to text-selection.

Comment 12

[Koushik Peri]

Hello :)

I am a new contributer to this project and this bug seems like a really fun one to start with! I have already setup the build environment and I can successfully install Fennec on my phone (Xperia SP Android 4.3) so I am ready to dive straight into this issue!

I played around with the Find In Page feature on Fennec and I agree with comment #4 as I sometimes see the discontinuity when the keyboard expands. 

Should I be looking into moving the things into the action bar as comment#10 and comment#11 have suggested?  Furthermore, should I be looking into all the issues outlined in comment #9?

Comment 13

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

^

Comment 14

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Lets make new bugs for these things. I'll file and link them against this. I'll assign you to the main one to move find-in-page to an actionmode if you want Koushik?

Comment 15

[Koushik Peri]

Sure, that sounds great!

Comment 16

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 17

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.