992456 - Show only the folder name and not the whole path on the downloads location preference field

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth]]

Attachment: leaf.patch

Splitting bug 992185 into two

Currently, if the Downloads or Desktop folder is selected as the download location preference field (Preferences>General). If a different folder is selected, it shows the full path.

This is a bit cramped and the available space is taken up by the /home/username (or C:\Users\username) text which is hardly helpful. We can replace it with the folder name instead.

Comment 1

[Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth]]

Attachment: Patch 1

Comment 2

[Zhenshuo Fang (:fang) - Firefox UX Team]

I think showing the whole path is actually helpful and expected behavior. Yes the path can get fairly long but I assume usually it's within a tolerable length. We can show the folder name and delete the less useful part say "C:\Users\username", but my worry is we are trying to be over smart and might confused the user because it's unexpected behavior. Also with the new in-content prefs, we have more space there.

I think this is a wonfix for me if the only reason of deleting the path is because it doesn't look nice, unless there's another reason I'm not aware of.

Comment 3

[Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth]]

(In reply to Zhenshuo Fang (:fang) - Firefox UX Team from comment #2)

> I think this is a wonfix for me if the only reason of deleting the path is
> because it doesn't look nice, unless there's another reason I'm not aware of.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/rJiF8.png (this screenshot is on a build from before the scrollbar patch landed, ignore the scrollbar)

The reason is that it doesn't fit. We could expand the field size if we want as an alternate fix.

The other reason is that the behavior is a bit inconsistent, for the Downloads and Desktop folder no path is shown but paths are shown elsewhere. This isn't too confusing, though.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth] from comment #3)
> The other reason is that the behavior is a bit inconsistent, for the
> Downloads and Desktop folder no path is shown but paths are shown elsewhere.
> This isn't too confusing, though.

No path is shown in those cases because those are well-known system Folders, and so we treat them specially. Showing only arbitrary folder names alone is much more confusing. I don't think there's value in consistency here.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

We should definitely fix the truncation issue in your screenshot somehow, though. Perhaps just by waiting for in-content prefs to be done. I assume the problem doesn't occur there?

Comment 6

[Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth]]

(In reply to :Gavin Sharp (email [e-mail]) from comment #4)
 No path is shown in those cases because those are well-known system Folders,
> and so we treat them specially. Showing only arbitrary folder names alone is
> much more confusing. I don't think there's value in consistency here.

Yeah, I thought so too, though this was Camelia's main concern on the other bug so I brought it up.


The scrollbars bug is bug 990973, once that is fixed it should be easy enough to expand the downloads field. Once we get a UI for bug 990973, we can go ahead with this.