Re: [Usability] Re: [Epiphany] epiphany toolbar/bookmarks

["Robert A. Thompson" <ucs_rat shsu edu>]

After seeing that galeon was out and epiphany was in on the gnome logs,
I decided that I needed to switch over and see how things are going as a
browser is a key component of my daily work.  Please forgive me if I'm
behind the times as far as the list goes as I'm back logged reading the
list archives right now, inbetween compiles of adding features I really
depend on for helping me do my day to day work.  That said I wanted to
offer some $0.02 and the possibility of hopefully helping out.

I run a medium network for a university (about 18,000 users).  If you
would be interested I could probably genereate some statistics based on
what the users favorites folder and bookmarks.html is structured like. 
It would take me a little bit to put together some scripts to do this,
however it shouldn't be to terribly difficult.  I'm open to suggestions
of what people would want to know as I have a pretty wide range of users
from(students, faculty, staff, idiots, zealots, and etc).  

The few things I would expect to see is 1) no organization just a list
of bookmarks, 2) highly tree'ed list of bookmarks(as the user will
bookmark every link in google for future reference), 3) little to no
bookmarks but a toolbar with 5-10 links of highly visited sites.

I have a feeling a study(beyond my capabilities) would show that the
people who don't use the hierarchies, is b/c the users just don't have
good organization skills or they are lazy.  They don't know where things
fit, and really need help choosing what is news and what is sports and
etc(epiphany is already taking care of this user).  On that same note, I
personally find the pop up dialog that lets you check where to put the
bookmark really nice as it fixes the lazy problem(and helps nudge the
user into choosing where things fit[organizing]).  Users bookmark
something so they can get back to it, and then go on reading the page. 
However, they never go back and move bookmark into a catagory.  Epiphany
doesn't allow you to do this and hence takes care of one set of users
and really encourages the other set.
 
Personally, I find the new bookmark system to be one of the best
"bookmark editors/catagorizers" out there.  However, for actually
getting to the site, I find it rather cumbersome to open a new window
click on a link in it and then close that window.   I believe(with
nothing to back me up) that users just won't like the seperate window to
just get to frequently visited sites(this is why I'm starting on a link
toolbar as I get my arms around what all the sourcecode does)

On a final note, I would like to ask what peoples opinion of the "smart
bookmark" that galeon has(as I would probably start coding on it, it
appears the bookmark file is already able to handle it looking at some
of the preloaded links)?  From personal experience, every user I have
brought from windows to linux(or shown galeon too) after seeing the
smartbookmark folder they were hooked.  I've had users that wouldn't go
back to windows b/c they said they couldn't live with out that feature. 
It is one of the things that I feel galeon got right.

--Robert