Re: firefox user trying out epiphany looking for bookmarks toolbar

[Joseph Huang <josephshuang gmail com>]

How about making  smart bookmarks postfix? Such as search terms g instead of g search term. That would enable easy changing of what you would like to do, but might mess with other things. So maybe search terms;g would be better? Anyways, the selecting smart bookmarks by using the down arrow is quite annoying because it's far from home row. (unless you have remapped the numpad to letters, as I have done before in windows...) Also, it's much easier to type one key at a time, so ;g is probably better than using a modifier. Perhaps selecting a smart bookmark via down arrow would add the ;g at the end, so that people would figure out that ;g does the same thing, but is much easier.

On 11/3/05, Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org> wrote:

Hi Matthew,

On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:

> I think it's reasonable to expect someone to read the manual before
> posting to the mailing list. However, I don't think it's reasonable to
> expect someone to ever need to read the manual for something as simple
> as bookmarks!

Good point. If it isn't obvious for the casual user how to use the
(bookmarks) toolbar, there is room for improvement.

> First, there is only one thing in Epiphany's Bookmarks Bar by default, and
> *it's not a bookmark*. At least, it's not a bookmark in the sense that anyone

For what it's worth, the current 1.9 series doesn't distinguish anymore
between a regular toolbar and one that contains (smart) bookmarks or
topics.

> who has used the Internet during the past ten years has come to understand
> and recognize bookmarks. And as much as you might marvel at the technical
> wizardry that lets a text field appear in the Bookmarks Bar, it still doesn't
> make sense.

Even if you don't understand what the text field is supposed to do,
clicking 'Search the Web' will take you to Google. Smart bookmarks are
still bookmarks :-)

> So I think it might be time to bite the bullet and have a single
> search field on the toolbar, like Firefox and Safari do. Besides being
> more obvious, this would have other benefits.

Personally I'm not in favour of that. Typing in your query in the
address bar already lets you select the search engine/online
dictionary/whatever after you've typed your search text. There are bugs
open about showing favicons in the dropdown and about supporting the
mozilla sidebar addSearchEngine function to create smart bookmarks. I
expect that once these are implemented, we'll have equivalent
functionality without adding another interface element. Besides, using
the main address bar has the advantage of being able to see the complete
query if your search text is longer than one or two words.

> *   It gives you a single place to go to see your recent searches.

I'd support the idea of remembering smart bookmark queries, but it would
have to be very easy to delete them from the autocomplete widget,
otherwise I think there would be big negative privacy implications.
(Accidentally seeing a URL visited by someone else is one thing, seeing
someone else's search queries is quite another!)

> *   It's self-contained, rather than spread over several fields, and
>     could therefore be moved to the panel in the future (or integrated
>     with deskbar or similar) with minimum fuss.

Leaving this sort of functionality to the deskbar applet is another
option. We'll have to see how it turns out with the GNOME 2.14
inclusion.

> add to my Bookmarks Bar, I go to "Bookmarks" > "Add Bookmark...", and
> get a dialog that *doesn't let me add the bookmark to the Bookmarks
> Bar*.

In the other thread we're discussing the Add Bookmark dialogue, maybe it
should be considered there if a checkbox for adding a bookmark to the
toolbar is desirable. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the new toolbar editor
contains a 'Quick Bookmark' item that allows you to select a bookmark
from the menu to place on the toolbar once you drag the QB item to the
toolbar, would that be sufficient?

> And third, the same problem occurs when editing bookmarks -- there
> should be a "Bookmarks Bar" place in the editor where I can see all
> the Bookmarks Bar bookmarks in one place, but there isn't.

To be fair, all bookmarks in the bookmarks bar are plainly visible in
the browser window itself. Typing the first few letters of the title
will quickly dig the relevant bookmark up. But, it's possible that a new
special topic 'On Toolbar' or similar would make managing the bookmarks
on the toolbar easier. Anyone who wants to write this? :)

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen       ***  student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl    ***  mobile phone: +31-6-44360778
www.vanschouwen.info       ***  help mee met GNOME vertalen: nl.gnome.org
_______________________________________________
epiphany-list mailing list
epiphany-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/epiphany-list