What is drop-down button (at the tright of the location bar) for ?

[antistress]

Hi,

Reading the Bug 578967 "Remove feed/RSS button from top-level GUI for
Firefox 4 (move to bookmarks menu)" which will help users to
concentrate on essential features, i was wandering what was the drop-
down button (at the tright of the location bar) for ?
Its result is not the same than the "Most visited" button on the
personal bar.
I've asked to a lot of people and nobody seems to know what is its
role ? Moreover there is no tooltip on it.
I have to ask if that button is necessary or not since i can't find
someone who knows its role...
Thanks

[Asa Dotzler]

I also question its utility.

IE, Opera, and Firefox each have a slightly different version of this
menu. In Firefox it appears to be different than the list I get in
autocomplete when I type a character that's in every address, like a
period, so it's not just the top awesomebar sites. It's also not a
history by visit count list since my top items are way down in my visit
count. Maybe it's the sites that are most frequently visited by tying in
the addressbar (rather than from, say, bookmarks)?

The fact that I don't know what exactly it is doesn't mean a lot
thought. I'm a quirky browser power-user with all kinds of abnormal
usage habits. Perhaps it's really really popular among "regular folks"

- A

[Alex Faaborg]

There's some related discussion on the topic in this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593624

We'll likely want to morph and improve this type of functionality once we
have a Home Tab, but there aren't any changes planned for Firefox 4.

-Alex

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[Asa Dotzler]

Apparently it's called the "Most Visited button" and it's used by quite
a large number of people, more than a third. Science!

https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/

I don't think it's really most visited though, because it doesn't match
up with my history list sorted by most visited. So I'm not sure what it
really is.

- A

[James May]

It uses 'frecency' (
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_Places_frecency_algorithm).

[Asa Dotzler]

On 9/25/2010 8:53 PM, James May wrote:
> It uses 'frecency' (
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_Places_frecency_algorithm).

I don't think it's frecency since it doesn't match up with the results
of typing / or . in the addressbar (which appear in all of my results).

There's something somewhat different going on here. Perhaps they're
pulling out visits that were triggered by bookmarks or link navigation
or something like that.

- A

[Mike Beltzner]

On 2010-09-26, at 12:20 AM, Asa Dotzler wrote:

> On 9/25/2010 8:53 PM, James May wrote:
>> It uses 'frecency' (
>> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_Places_frecency_algorithm).
>
> I don't think it's frecency since it doesn't match up with the results of typing / or . in the addressbar (which appear in all of my results).

It's frecency based on selection from that drop-down list, actually. Frecency has different values based on the modality of interaction.

cheers,
mike