952849 - Unable to get rid of the "display your bookmarks" icon while keeping the star icon

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I would like to keep the star icon in my toolbar so I can easily star pages, but I don't want or need the "display your bookmarks" bit: I just search them via the awesomebar.

But I don't see a way to customize the toolbar to only show the star, not the other thing.  Am I just missing something?

Comment 1

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Not missing anything, this was an intentional design decision to increase the connectedness between bookmark-creation and bookmark-access.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

OK, but it's taking up way too much space on my toolbar (literally: it's cutting off parts of the URL that I actually want to be able to read) for functionality I never use.  I access bookmarks through the awesomebar * bit, and failing that through the menu.

So as a user, I seem to be placed in the position of either having no easy way to bookmark pages or in having not enough space for my url bar, no?

Comment 3

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

We talked over IRC, and the setup that you're using is:
> back/forward button, the url bar, the star thing, download button, profiler button, three lines button
with a window size of 975px.

This provides for a fairly large url bar, but it may not be large enough for some people who want to read long paths without first giving focus to the url bar. With an empty identity block, this provides 114 character URLs on Win7 with default font-sizes.

I'm inclined to say that the overlap of users who want to read URLs, and those with URLs that are longer than 114 characters is a fairly small user group, and one that we shouldn't be designing our UI for.

Comment 4

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

(In reply to Boris Zbarsky [:bz] from comment #2)
> OK, but it's taking up way too much space on my toolbar (literally: it's
> cutting off parts of the URL that I actually want to be able to read) for
> functionality I never use.  I access bookmarks through the awesomebar * bit,
> and failing that through the menu.
> 
> So as a user, I seem to be placed in the position of either having no easy
> way to bookmark pages or in having not enough space for my url bar, no?

See if any of the 'hacks' in this thread help: 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=952849

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> with a window size of 975px.

935px.

> With an empty identity block

Mine's typically nonempty in the cases I care about.

On my Mac, with an empty identity block I'm at 84 chars visible in the URL bar.  With the Bugzilla identity block, it's about 72 characters.  With my bank's identity block, it's about 62 characters.  60 characters once the "Flash is blocked" icon pops in.

I can understand the default UI not being designed around the way I use the browser, nor am I asking for that.  But I'm not sure why customization also precludes me freeing up more url bar space...

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> See if any of the 'hacks' in this thread help: 

Wrong link?

Comment 7

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

(In reply to Boris Zbarsky [:bz] from comment #6)
> > See if any of the 'hacks' in this thread help: 
> 
> Wrong link?

yep, sorry...
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2778917&p=13227275&hilit=star+button#p13227275

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Sure, styles like that in userChrome.css fix the problem.  I've added this one for now:

  #bookmarks-menu-button > dropmarker { display: none; }

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

So far, we consider the menu as part of the bookmarking experience (hope it will also get more integrated in future), so the only options are:
- don't use bookmarks so much -> customize to the hamburger menu
- use bookmarks -> keep on the toolbar

Judging from the click maps we had, the bookmarks menu was one of the hot points, so having it well visible and attached to the star (single point of interaction for bookmarks) should help most of the users.
For a maintainability and support points of view we preferred to avoid the usual headache of magic buttons merging when close each other. The simple solution to these concerns was the current splig widget.

Unfortunately this causes us to steal the space of an additional button, though the only alternative suggested to keep a single point of interaction involved killing one-click-bookmarking feature, that was a pretty strong selling point in the past.
Suggestions are welcome, btw.

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Suggestions are welcome, btw.

Could you have two widgets available in the customization menu: one that's the combined widget and one that's just the star?  Then I could just customize my toolbar to have the one I want....  The one-click bookmarking is all I really want out of this entire UI, after all.