Pathfinder Development » Keeping up with Firefox 3: Improvements, bugs and missing features in the new bookmark manager

Keeping up with Firefox 3: Improvements, bugs and missing features in the new bookmark manager

Brian Dillard, Monday, March 3, 2008 @ 5:04 pm

I'm a trigger-happy bookmarker, likely to command-D any page that seems like it could be of use in the future. I've learned to live with my affliction, but the Firefox 2 bookmark manager doesn't exactly make my life easier. The problem? An interface that mimics the look and feel of a filesystem but deviates substantially from users' expectations about how a filesystem operates.

With Firefox 3 now in its third beta release, I recently spent some time determining how its completely overhauled bookmark manager stacks up. The verdict? I see lots of cool new features, but it's not a home run yet. I'm not sure whether the issues I saw were bugs, as-yet-unimplemented features, or poor design choices. Regardless, the Firefox 3 Beta 3 bookmark manager leaves several Firefox 2 annoyances unfixed and creates a couple of its own.

How things worked: Firefox 2

First, a little background. The Firefox 2 bookmark manager's sins are multitudinous, but here are a choice few, from the venal to the mortal:

A user who wants to rename a file knows to click it once, wait for the filename to become editable, and then type the new filename. The same does not apply for a bookmark or folder in the Firefox 2 bookmark manager. To rename a bookmark or folder, you must either right-click it and edit its properties, or else select it and click a "Rename" button in the top toolbar.
Users are also trained to delete files by selecting them and clicking the keyboard's "delete" key. To delete a Firefox 2 bookmark, though, you must right-click it for a context menu or select it and click a button in the top toolbar.
It's the same story with folder creation. You'd expect command-N to create a new folder, but no. You're forced to use the "New Folder" button in the top toolbar. Even worse, those new folders show up in the most unexpected places - as siblings of the current folder rather than children. When pruning old bookmarks in Firefox 2, I constantly find empty directories named "New Folder" from where the UI confused me and I created folders in the wrong place.
As for more advanced organizational features, again, the UI proves consistently inconsistent. The entire bookmark interface looks like a two-pane version of Microsoft Windows Explorer, but certain capabilities are disabled in each pane. Let's say you want to move a folder. Seeing a collapsible folder hierarchy in the left pane of the interface, you locate the folder you wish to move. Guess what? There's no drag-and-drop in the left pane. The left pane is only for selecting the sub-folder whose contents you wish to display in the right pane. To actually move a sub-folder, you must choose its parent folder in the left pane, then find the icon for the sub-folder in the right pane, then drag that icon to its new home in the left pane. Intuitive as hell, right?
Bookmark sorting doesn't work as expected, either. To sort bookmarks by name, date or manual position, you click the column headers in the right pane of the interface. But those sorting changes get applied to your entire set of bookmarks at once, rather than just within the current folder. Sure, you can keep clicking on the column headers until the the sort order cycles back to its original setting, but there's no visual or verbal feedback about what the current sort scheme is. And it's very hard to organize bookmarks when the folder hierarchy in the left "drilldown" pane changes along with the sort order in the right "view" pane.
When you search your bookmarks using the input box in the top toolbar, the results are shown in the right viewing pane. But you can't drag-and-drop items from the search results to a new location. That makes it pretty difficult to round up bookmarks into a new folder when they were previously scattered throughout your folders.
There's no trash-can metaphor for deleted bookmarks and folders. You can command-Z to undo a recent deletion, but that only gets you so far.
The bookmark export feature is all-or-nothing. You can't export a single folder, which sucks when you want to, say, create a "Top 15 music APIs to power your next mashup" blog entry from your bookmarks.

I could go on, but suffice to say that after using the Firefox 2 bookmark manager UI for two years, I still curse loudly at my favorite web browser in the world so often that I feel like an abusive boyfriend.

How things are supposed to work now: The Firefox 3 "Places" concept

The vision for bookmarks in Firefox 3 has been widely reported. Redesigned from the bottom up and given a unified new interface, bookmarks have merged with history to form Places, a one-stop shop for revisiting previous sites. A massive UI overhaul was only one piece of a larger effort to redesign the underlying foundations of bookmarking. Instead of using the native filesystem to store bookmarks - which apparently caused some users to lose their bookmarks altogether after a crash - Firefox 3 uses SQLite and mozStorage to stow bookmarks in a full-on database. The API for manipulating bookmarks has also gotten a makeover, empowering extension authors to build cooler custom functionality.

How things actually work now: Firefox 3 Beta 3

Places has been in place since at least Firefox 3 Alpha 5, but I haven't given it much attention until the current Beta 3 release. I understand that the UI has come a long way between iterations, but with only one more beta release expected, I figured now was the time to give it a shakedown.

To test-drive the new Places interface, I installed Firefox 3 Beta 3 on a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4 Tiger. I exported my bookmarks from Firefox 2, then imported the resulting XML file into Firefox 3. I then attempted various organizational tasks, such as moving folders around within my bookmark hierarchy; adding, deleting and renaming bookmarks; and moving a set of bookmarks into the Bookmarks Toolbar for easy access. Here are my impressions; my analysis focuses solely on the UI aspects of the new Places interface, not the underlying code improvements.

Improvements

In addition to the standard "Bookmark This Page" command you can access from the menu system or command-D, Firefox 3 allows you to bookmark a site by starring it. Just click the star-outline icon in the right side of the address bar. The star icon becomes filled in and you know the site is bookmarked - all without ever seeing the dialog that lets you choose which folder to put your bookmark in. "Star" bookmarks are accessible from a special "Unfiled Bookmarks" smart folder in the manager interface. Pretty cool.
The bookmark manager interface still looks like a two-pane Windows Explorer instance with a toolbar at the top. Now, though, there's also an informational panel in the bottom of the right viewing pane that allows you to view and edit the current bookmark's meta-data - the same way you could always do by right-clicking and choosing "Properties." It's nice to know that they are trying to refine and improve the old UI rather than inventing a whole new one.
The "Delete" key now deletes bookmarks. What a difference a keyboard command makes.
Bookmarks and folders now get created as children rather than siblings of the current folder. Reason prevails!
Sorting is awesome. You can control which columns of information get displayed in the right-hand viewing pane, and you can sort by a dizzying array of criteria. The current column visibility and sort order can be seen and changed under a unified "Views" dropdown in the top toolbar.
Search has improved dramatically. The results still pop up in the right viewing pane like you'd expect, but you get an advanced-search dialog at the top of the result set in case you want to refine your results. Better yet, you can use search to corral a bunch of bookmarks, then move them to a new location by choosing Organize: Move from the top toolbar. (No drag-and-drop, but more on that later.)
There's now an explicit restore feature. Firefox 2 creates a backup of your bookmarks each morning, but you have to hunt in your profile folder to find it. With Firefox 3, you can create backups on demand and restore from existing automatic or user-generated backups through the GUI.
Tagging works about like you'd expect it to. Hello, del.icio.us.
There's now a key command (shift-command-B) for invoking the bookmarks organizer. This makes up for the fact that they've renamed the command from "Organize Bookmarks" to the less accurate "Show All Bookmarks" in the browser's menu.

Bugs, missing features and/or poor design choices

The old bookmark manager's confusing, limited, half-realized drag-and-drop has been replaced by ... no drag-and-drop at all. Within a folder in the right view pane, you can move items around by dragging them. But to move bookmarks from one folder to another, you have to select them and choose Organize: Move from the toolbar. You can do so with multiple bookmarks at once, but still. Back when I was a PC user, it was this kind of rinky-dink functionality in Internet Explorer that helped drive me to Firefox in the first place. But in Internet Explorer, at least you can drop down to the Windows filesystem and interact with your ~~bookmarks~~ favorites in the filesystem itself.
You can't use the Organize: Move dialog to move bookmarks into your Bookmarks Toolbar (which is a bummer, considering the lack of drag-and-drop). When you do so, said bookmarks simply disappear. This bug caused me to have to delete all of my imported bookmarks and then re-import them to recover the ones that went poof. I finally found a way to get bookmarks onto the toolbar: Use the standard context-menu (right-click) commands for Cut and Paste.
The fancy-pants new bookmark-creation dialog won't re-bookmark previously bookmarked sites. Let's say you bookmarked a site a year ago and filed it away. You rediscovered it today and want to bookmark it in your root bookmark folder - a place where you're likely to actually see the bookmark and act on it. You follow the usual drill by clicking command-D and then immediately hitting "return" when the dialog pops up. What you don't realize is that you haven't actually created a new bookmark in your root bookmark folder. All you've done is briefly glimpse a dialog telling you that the site is already bookmarked. You go merrily along, not realizing that the site you've just rediscovered is bookmarked only in the deep recesses of a hierarchical directory structure, where it's been gathering digital cobwebs since the first time you discovered it. You'll never see that bookmark - or that site - again.
It would be nice if there were a keyboard shortcut for "starring" a site.
It would also be cool if bookmarks created with the old-fashioned command-D ended up in the "Unfiled Bookmarks" smart folder along with the star bookmarks. I'd wager most people, when creating a bookmark, don't bother to file it then. They bookmark to their heart's content, then go back later to file. Why make them look in two places - "Unfiled Bookmarks" and the root of the bookmark folder hierarchy?
There's still no single-folder bookmark export.
You still can't rename bookmarks the way you can rename files in your OS, by single-clicking and typing over the names.
There's still no trash-can system for deleted bookmarks. Given that a database now drives everything, shouldn't this be easy?
Deleting or exporting a bunch of bookmarks at once is pretty slow. It seems like the database code still needs some optimization.
Bookmarks stay in the bookmarks menu after being deleted. The menu UI doesn't seem to get updated until seconds or minutes after you make a change in the menu manager UI.

Conclusions

As you can see, bookmark management has come a long way with Firefox 3 Beta 3. Most of my gripes with this UI are either inherited ones from Firefox 2 or obvious bugs that will no doubt be addressed. The biggest new usability problem is the way the interface refuses to bookmark something twice in two locations - a clear case of the browser thinking it knows better than me. I'm hoping that, too, is a bug rather than a feature. The nonexistent drag-and-drop is, I suppose, better than the confoundingly flaky drag-and-drop of Firefox 2. Still, I'm hoping d-n-d comes back better than ever in a future release.

Overall, though, I am impressed. During testing, I rolled my eyes at bugs and missing features, but I didn't curse out loud once. That's major progress, especially for a beta.

Topics: Firefox

agile ajax

Comments: 7 so far

No Drag and Drop at all?
How on earth could that be possible!

I decided that there was no way on earth the Mozilla devs were still living in the 80’s so I decided to check Bugzilla… surely someone filed this as a bug.

Sure enough: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381255

Looks like it’s supposed to work, but is broken at the moment.

Comment by Anonymous, Tuesday, March 11, 2008 @ 2:07 pm
Maybe another suggestion:
I hate that Firefox doesn’t have this feature, nor can I find an extension to add this simple, (should be standard) feature. I might have to create it myself.

In FF3 RC1, I just dragged the specific subfolder from the bookmarks list into a new email (thunderbird). This created a properly hyperlinked list that may be useful for sending emails.

You can also drag the subfolder into a new HTML file in Dreamweaver, useful for creating your own bookmarks list (not so much if you don’t have Dreamweaver).
Doesn’t work for Notepad or Office Word though.

Cheers.

P.S. SOMEONE MAKE THIS EXTENSION

Comment by Jay, Sunday, May 25, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
I totally don’t understand how I am supposed to organize my bookmarks now.

Why did they change it?
I am NOT a techie, so I really don’t see any improvement.

All I know is:
I used to be able to sort my bookmarks into folders, etc.
And now - I can’t.

Comment by June, Friday, July 11, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
My beefs with Firefox 3 bookmarking:

- Poking the “Bookmark This Page” actually creates a bookmark as soon as you poke on it, then it brings up the tiny, non-resizeable “Page Bookmarked” dialog. If you want to change the folder where the bookmark goes, you have to poke the pulldown button next to the “Folder” entry, but it only shows about 7 rows, so I end up scrolling a lot (and the dialog isn’t resizeable, so that’s annoying).

- I can’t have the same site bookmarked more than once. I used to have 3 bookmarks for Yahoo.com, and I had the login names as part of the bookmark title to remind me what the logins were. Now, I only have the first one.

- I much prefer the old FireFox 2 all-folders-expandable-in-a-single-pane view, vs. the new Firefox 3 left-pane-is folders, right-pane is current folder’s contents.

- Now that the currently selected bookmark’s properties are displayed in the bottom of the bookmark window, if you accidentally poke in there and change a value, there’s no OK/Cancel buttons to approve or cancel the change.

- The “Bookmark This Page” menu entry actually creates the bookmark and then brings up the aforementioned dialog that lets you change where the bookmark resides. The “Done” button does nothing, while the “Cancel” button removes the bookmark. Philosophically speaking, it really shouldn’t create the bookmark anywhere at all until you poke “Done”, and the “Cancel” button should just exit without doing anything — that’s the way 99% of every other dialog in every other windows application works.

- Just as in FireFox 2, when you search in FireFox 3’s bookmark window for a bookmark, it doesn’t show you where the heck your bookmark resides, it just presents all the matching ones in a folderless list. I would really like to know what folder the requested bookmark resides in.

- I use FF3 at work, and FF2 at home. I used to export my FF2 bookmarks to an HTML at work and bring them home and import them into FF2 bookmark file, but now I can’t do that.

Comment by jaj, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 @ 4:43 pm
With FF2, using the bookmark manager, I was able to see ALL of my bookmarks in one array if I wanted to. I could see bookmarks NOT in a folder, the folders below it, AND the contents of any of those folders if I wanted to see that. So bookmarks at various hierarchical levels were visible simultaneously. Which, importantly to me, meant I could view the RHS window and FIND any bookmark easily. Critical as I maintain 1000+ bookmarks.

Now with FF3, based on my shallow review of it, I can only view the contents of ONE folder at a time. Which means I either have to remember the name of the bookmark to search for it, OR recall where EXACTLY it is. I tend to do neither. As a result, I have deleted FF3 and returned to FF2. I will not upgrade until FF offers the old functionality via a manager in some newer version. Its just too critical to me.

Comment by Pieter vL, Thursday, August 21, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
First, I don’t see why it makes sense to store bookmarks in a database. For me as user it is easier to copy a flat file than to save a database!
Second, I don’t see how to organize my bookmaks too. I have entries in my Bookmarks pull-down, that don’t show up in the organize dialog.
Please re-establish bookmarks in the way they used to be, thanks a lot!
PS: This is Firefox 3.0.1 on Linux

Comment by Heiko, Tuesday, August 26, 2008 @ 4:54 am
Can some body tell me how to update the Bookmark Database.
Scenarios:
I have intalled FF3.0 in system A. I have some bookmark in system A. I also have a system B with FF3.0. Now I wanted to import all the Bookmark from System B and update the System A FF3.0 Bookmarks.

Comment by Arindam, Wednesday, November 19, 2008 @ 7:36 am