956383 - Improve "What should Firefox do with this file?" UI

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Alex Buchanan [:abuchanan]]

I'm proposing an improvement to the UI related to opening/saving a downloaded file.

The scenario:
Sally sends me a PDF via GMail. I click the GMail download link, and I'm presented with a pop-up window titled "Opening file_name_here.pdf" which gives some information about the file, and more importantly asks "What should Firefox do with this file?"

I read a lot of scientific papers, and I have an app named "Papers" that I use to open scientific papers in PDF files. To open Sally's PDF in this manner, I click the "Open with" drop-down menu and select the "Papers" app, then click "Ok".

Sometimes the PDF I'm downloading isn't a paper though, so I need to click the drop-down menu, select "Preview" (Mac specific), and click "Ok".

PDFs are my most frequently downloaded file type. Let's say I download 10-20 PDFs a week. I might use each app for 50% of those PDFs.

The proposal:
There is opportunity to improve the UI around this action. I'm proposing specifically that the drop-down menu, save option, and "Ok" button change, but other improvements might exist outside of that scope.

My idea is to make commonly used options top-level buttons, so that I don't need multiple clicks to select an option from a radio/drop-down menu and then click "Ok". 

"Papers" would be a nice, top-level button, which I could click to complete the dialog. More extensive options could be available via a sort of "More options" button. "Save" could also be a top-level button. These buttons would include icons for easy visual recognition, e.g. the "Papers" button could show the Papers app icon.

One downside is that I don't know yet what happens to the "Do this automatically for files like this from now on." checkbox, since a top-level button that immediately closed the dialog window would leave me no change to click the checkbox. I hope there are other ways to implement this pattern of choosing a default action.

The "Ok" button would become obsolete. The "cancel" button *could* be removed, but perhaps it's good form to have a very obvious "cancel" button (to which you'd argue that the window close button is obvious enough).

I can provide a rough mockup if there is interested and/or my description isn't clear.

As I said, my gut tells me there are other tweaks that could make this interface nicer, e.g. personally I never look at anything outside of the actions (pop-up/radio/buttons), but I leave that outside the scope of this bug.

Finally (wow this is getting long winded, sorry) someone please help me find the appropriate bugzilla attributes (product, component, etc) as I'm never sure where bugs belong.

Thanks.