Keeping up with Firefox 3: Six more bookmark-manager gotchas

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, March 4, 2008 @ 1:17 pm

I found four more bugs and two more feature requests to add to yesterday's massive, minutiae-laden post about the Firefox 3 bookmarks manager:

Feature request: It would be awesome if you could sort your bookmarks by specific criteria, then make that sort order permanent. This would work exactly like the iTunes "Copy to playlist order" command. As in Firefox 2, you can approximate this by sorting your bookmarks alphabetically, moving them to a new folder, and moving them back. Then, even when you revert back to the "unsorted" view, the bookmarks stay in alphabetical order. Of course, this is way less necessary in Firefox 3, which can remember different sort orders for different bookmark folders, thus obviating the need to wrangle some folders into natural sort and others into alphabetical sort by brute force. Still, it's a nice-to-have.

Feature request: The Views menu in the top toolbar should be broken out into separate Show and Sort menus. This is commonly accessed functionality, and it's really annoying to have a two-item menu where each item contains around 10 sub-items which can only be accessed by clicking the menu, moving down, moving right, then moving down again to locate the desired item.

Bug: If you accidentally try to move an item to the same folder it's
already in, it will simply disappear. Thank god for command-Z,
otherwise I would have accidentally deleted a folder with hundreds of
bookmarks.

Bug: When you try to reorder items within a folder using
drag-and-drop, sometimes items lose their way. I wanted to alphabetize the sub-folders within my bookmarks menu. Since there was no "Copy to playlist order"-esque command, I
resorted to manually dragging the folders around. About half the time,
I would drag a folder and drop it into a spot, only to see it jump up
or down a couple of spots of its own volition.

Bug: Yesterday I reported that if you change the order of some
folders within your hierarchy, the Bookmarks menu in the main browser
window won't immediately reflect the new hierarchy. I now see
that the same behavior extends to the Organize: Move dialog. It seems
like different components of the view model cache their representations
of the underlying database for too long.

Bug: The latency I reported yesterday for deleting or exporting a
large set of bookmarks extends to moving them. We're talking
multi-second latency to move 100 bookmarks.

Besides the feature requests, these all seem like bugs that would already be on the Firefox team's
radar, but I figured I may as well document them. Judging by the
comments on my previous posts, Mozilla folks seem pretty vigilant about
monitoring the blogsphere.

agile ajax

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   One word: care - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=care
   One domain: del.icio.us

   It’d be way better to have them working on buil-in sync with popular online bookmarking services or coming up with a similar service of their own.

   Comment by lmjabreu, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 @ 4:39 am

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