Places:Bookmarks:Rethinking

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Rethinking Firefox Bookmarking

Places brings many new capabilities to the bookmarks and history system. However, the UI for accessing and managing bookmarks has not really changed that much. In this document, we describe some potential future directions.

Motivation

Bookmarks work very well for pages that are revisited often. For these pages, the small mental overhead of filing in the proper place for easy retrieval is offset by the benefit that the user recieves. Firefox currently handles this case very well.

However, other important use-cases are not handled well. Some of the use-cases we would like to handle (see also Bookmarks Use Cases for lots of ideas) are:

• Research: The user is researching a topic such as airline flights. They want to collect certain pages together and possibly remember key information from them such as time and cost. The user may, but does not necessarily, care about convenient future access.

• To-do list: The user wants to remember a page to come back to. For example, directions to a party on the weekend, or an article to finish reading. They want to come back to it no more than a few times, and is not interested in permanent storage.

• Long-term recall: The user wants to remember a page, but is not interested in accessing it frequently. For example, a HOWTO on configuring a piece of hardware that would not be needed until the OS is re-installed, or an obscure but potentially useful page on the company intranet.

There are other goals:

• It should be as easy as possible to get a basic amount of bookmarking and recall, even for new users. The current system doesn't do this. Most users use autocomplete + Google.

• If the previous goal is successful, we will need to be able to handle large numbers of bookmarks smoothly. The current system does not handle more than about 20 bookmarks in the menu.

• Don't significantly change the UI for people that have learned to use the current system. Most people will not want to learn something new, and will be upset if their bookmarks have moved. It should be possible to slowly transition to the new features.

Notes

It is common that a small part of a page contains most of the value of the page. For example, the time and price of an airline ticket, or the address of a winery that you want to visit. For this task, we introduce "notes," which are enhanced bookmark descriptions, a little-known feature of the old bookmarks system.

To add a note, the user can select text and right-click.

note_add.png

The selected text would get appended to the current note for the page, and the note pane would appear:

note_added.png

This pane would appear whenever the user visits a page where they have added a note. It would also be toggle-able from the View menu.

Viewing notes

One of the most important reasons for notetaking is the ability to have all the information in one place. To view notes added to pages, the user can click on "View notes" in any bookmark or tag view:

tagging_notes.png

This provides all the information that they have noted for all pages in one convenient view. For example, the use would tag their airline pages with the same tag, and would be able to call all of them up at once to compare.

Open question: What happens if a note is added to a page that is not bookmarked? Perhaps we want to add it to the bookmark inbox.