Check out the video in the post, and leave feedback here!
https://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/04/27/awesomebar-hd-find-what-you-want/
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prospector-awesomeBar-HD/versions/#version-2
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On Apr 27, 2011, at 3:31 PM, Paul Morris wrote:
> I've noticed what appears to be a bug. After using it awhile on my mac, the menus (File, Edit, View, etc) can become unresponsive when you click them. Disabling the add-on sometimes fixes it, but it's not consistent. Restarting Firefox seems to temporarily fix the problem.
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Do you use multiple windows? And perhaps DOM Inspector or the Error
Console? I've opened an issue for people to leave comments:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/245
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press ctrl-l (or click in the location bar) then..
s<tab> random topic
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There's a number of technical issues that prevent mouse interactions,
so it defaults to selecting all. You can follow along in this issue:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/247
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Currently, you can type "search:" at the beginning to activate search.
Potentially that same logic can be applied to detect "search:"
anywhere in the input, so you could type the term and then "search:".
> If the search categories reordered themselves based on historical search behavior
That could work if the visual list of categories wasn't there.
Reordering dynamically seems to work for search results, but having UI
targets automatically move around can be pretty confusing to users.
Ed
> Presumably you'd set your favorite option for each category and not change
> it as much as you would select between different categories?
That may be true. We hope to do Test Pilot studies soon to see how
people interact, and if they prefer to change providers or categories.
Ed
Once AwesomeBar HD provides support for adding custom searches as well
as instant previews, you get something that feels very much like
Ubiquity. You can type a command and some words, and you see a results
page update as you type.
One big difference is that this feels more "of the web" in that there
aren't specially written Ubiquity commands. It's a search that hits a
webpage with a query. (And if the site is fancy like Google Translate,
using the URI #fragment avoids refetching whole pages for this instant
preview / live updating behavior.)
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Anything particular reason you want to look at it in the first place?
You're just looking there because it's usually been there? You're
getting ready to edit the url? Seeing if you want to copy to share?
> So my favorite workflow would be: doubleclick url to select full line, type,
> tab, enter for google. Or just enter to go to URL.
Are you saying that works now with AwesomeBar HD or that's what you
would want it to do? Other than you potentially accidentally clicking
a category, those steps you describe work for me. In fact, you can
save a click by not double-clicking.
Ed
There's quite a bit of information that Firefox can process from
previous form inputs to pages in your history and opensearch provider
data. Independent of that, there's a bunch of ways to highlight the
ability to add a search provider, e.g., right-click input, decorating
the input, highlighting the search area in the chrome, etc. Throw
categories into the mix and it can get even more complicated.
> please enlarge the URL. :)
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/250
One tricky aspect of making it dynamically take up more space is to
make sure there's a good minimum amount of information. Right now the
url is always truncated just before the end of .com, .org, .net, etc.
This makes sure you always see "bank.com.evil.c..." and not just
"bank.com...".
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> Just like you said I'd hit category links accidentially.
v4 hides the categories by default giving the whole space to the url,
so it's easy to click anywhere in the location bar without needing to
worry about accidentally clicking them.
Ed
I suspect just a preventDefault() or stopPropagation() somewhere will
help alleviate that =)
--da
v4 is indeed much better!
some bugs you probably already know about (I'll just dump them here):
- "press tab" hint steals focus on linux (using gnome3 shell here), rendering bar unusable
For now it'll show the menu after pointing at the link for a little
bit. A different implementation that wasn't committed would constantly
delay the menu each time the mouse moved, but that ran into some user
timing issues as the user is likely to slow down the cursor ready to
click, but because there was always a fixed delay from the last
movement, the menu wouldn't have been ready.
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Now the menu only opens after moving the mouse, so if the mouse cursor
is still when clicking, it won't immediately cause the popup to open.
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At one point I had some crazy inactiveness detection hack...
document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("#urlbar:-moz-window-inactive {
-moz-column-gap: 0 }", 10);
function isInactive() window.getComputedStyle(gURLBar).MozColumnGap[0] == "0";
Ed
Most of the time I want to use the location bar for doing stuff with the current page (bookmark, look at identity info, refresh, etc.). Navigating is a different mode. It's not so much that I never want to see the labels (Go to a website, search the web, books, food, maps, movies, etc.), but that I only want to see them when I'm navigating (and then not necessarily all the time).
So I don't think the solution is to get rid of some of the mouse UI, but rather to make AwesomeBar HD more expressly modal. Make a clear modal distinction between tools for the current page (bookmark, identity, location services, etc.) and tools for navigating to another place.
perhaps all the action should be in the dropdown. While the current dropdown only appears once you start typing, why not have extra ui exposed at the top of the dropdown as soon as the awesomebar is selected? It could be a line across the top,
Putting the ui in the drop down moves things closer to a "home tab or
new tab page" that focuses on navigation, except as a drop-down,
perhaps it'll feels less like you're getting rid of the current page
as you can still see the page behind the drop down.
This is also somewhat similar to earlier Fennec designs where there
was a list of search engines near the bottom of the list. One benefit
of being a touch interface is that placement of items is less of an
issue. Moving your finger to the first item in the list vs somewhere
further down is fairly similar. However on the desktop, there's both
keyboard navigation and mouse, so laying out a dropdown is somewhat
trickier.
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Additionally, how would users select a particular provider by
keyboard? It seems like one would need to move down and across
although some shortcutting could be done with tab completion. But it
seems like it would also break the simple navigation to frequently
visited pages, e.g., "type n, press down, hit enter".
Ed
> I would also like to see search suggestions
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/276
Ed
> clicking white space in bar clears current URL instead of select-all
This is by design for people that are used to clicking the search bar
near the top-right of Firefox. There's now empty space to click that
functions similarly to the old pattern.
> can't click to place cursor in auto-selected URL for editing
This is partially because the location bar right now looks like a
normal input box but is actually a bunch of separate text labels
placed together to get categories clickable.
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/247
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Felix on AMO posted a video that helped me see what was going on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjDFBcb7g4
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> I usually have ~10-15 other search providers I use very often
Would you be okay if those search providers appeared under the first
category? Perhaps later on when there's more customization, engines
could be moved? We're tracking this issue here:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/248
> I usually press CTRL+K, then CTRL+Up/Down to quickly navigate to the provider
Starting from v7, you can also switch providers like the searchbar to
change within a provider. So if search the web had your other search
engines, you could switch just like the original searchbar.
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Curious, how often do you want the url of the search result page?
Ed
I tried some immediate changes, but doesn't seem to be a trivial fix
for some reason.
Ed