Places
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Places is a new system for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about pages. It is scheduled to go into Firefox 3. This document covers much of the design and user-interface of Places. Developers should read the developer documentation.
Status: History-on-Places is currently enabled on the trunk, and is in A2. Bookmarks-on-places is targeting A4. Tinderboxes for Bookmarks-on-Places are in Test Tinderbox.
We'll be using the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup and this wiki for discussion and communication.
Goals & Objectives
The primary objectives of this project are to:
- Improve access to History and Bookmarks
- Make it easier for people to Bookmark pages
Secondary objectives include:
- Consolidating user data formats
- Providing a platform for using interesting per-URL metadata
- Improving the capabilities of Live Bookmarks
- Providing a solid architecture for bookmark sync and remote storage
Builds
Places is currently enabled on the "trunk" build of Firefox (aka Firefox 3 aka Minefield aka Gran Paradiso), and powers History and Bookmarks, as well as providing plumbing for Livemarks, Annotations and Microsummaries.
Trunk builds are considered unstable and are recommended only for developers and those testers who like to live dangerously.
Please file bugs in Bugzilla.
Overview
Implement new back ends for Bookmarks and History using the mozStorage system. Develop newer, more usable front end components to display results, emphasizing simple search and categorization.
Background
Studies from the late 1990s show that while revisitations of pages previously seen counted for roughly 39% of all page navigations (see Google Scholar), Bookmarks and History usage was low (1-3%), despite the fact that roughly 20% of those revisitations were to pages seen > 10 URLs ago (and thus outside the usefulness range of the Back button or menu).
Autocomplete in the URL bar is a useful tool but fails to address some common desires when looking up visited pages. There is a gulf between the capabilities of that tool, the capabilities of the Bookmarks and History systems today, and the desired capabilities of those systems.
Use Cases
- Places:History Use Cases
- Bookmarks Use Cases (not specific to places)
Functional Requirements
The requirements for Places in Firefox 3 are detailed in the Firefox 3 PRD
Plans & Design Documents
Design Documents
- Places:URL Store
- Places:Bookmarks
- Places:place URIs
- Places:Results
- Places:Controller
- Browser History
- Places:AutoComplete
- Places:Transactions
- Places:Drag & Drop
- Places:Manager
Much of the design information is on the developers wiki.
Special Containers
More to come...
Code Location
mozilla/browser/components/places/
for the front-end,
mozilla/toolkit/components/places/
for the back-end.
Team
- Dietrich Ayala
- Asaf Romano
- Neil Deakin
- Dan Mills
- Seth Spitzer
With help and guidance from:
- Brett Wilson
- Myk Melez (microsummaries)
- Robert Sayre (feeds)
- Mike Connor
- Alex Faaborg
See Places:Task List for a list of tasks.
Meetings/Discussion
- mozilla.dev.apps.firefox
- #places on irc
- Weekly meetings on Thursday at 2pm PST in #places. See Places/StatusMeetings for the logs of the past meetings.
API Changes Required
The APIs for accessing Bookmarks and History will be replaced. APIs abstracting the layout of the metadata tables used in the profile storage file will be provided. See above for details.
Impact
Extensions
The APIs for accessing and manipulating Bookmarks and History are being replaced with new ones, and almost all Bookmarks and History user interface will be replaced or updated significantly. Any extension that does anything with History or Bookmarks will almost certainly have to be rewritten, at the very least to use the new APIs.
Performance
Bookmarks can have a non-trivial impact on performance, see Places:Performance for more information.
Discussion & Implications
Discussion Elsewhere
- The Evolution of Bookmarking -- Bookmarks, Firefox, del.icio.us, Tagging, and Information Management
- Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents, Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, May 6-10, 1996, Paris, France. (Google Scholar search for the article if it moves)
- Comments from Todd Agulnick of Foxmarks
Archived Build Notes (obsolete)
Milestone 2 (1/30/2006):
What's new in this build:
- Your existing history is now preserved and imported into Places.
- You can search from the Places view
- You can construct queries over your history/bookmarks and save them
- If you are migrating to Firefox from another browser, your history and bookmarks are imported into Places.
- Stability, performance, and bug fixes
Known issues:
- It is recommended that you delete the file "storage.sdb" in your profile directory if you have previously run a Places build.
- This build is based on the Firefox 2.0 branch. It still claims to be 1.5, so 1.5-compatible extensions will continue to function. Extensions that utilize the old bookmarks and history interfaces will not work correctly.
- If you use the installer, you have to do a custom install and disable Quality Feedback Agent. Otherwise, the installation will error out.
- Bookmark keywords do not work yet.
- If your profile directory is on NFS, you will see slower performance.
Milestone 1 (12/15/2005):
This is our first public milestone build. It has a working Places view, history, and bookmarks (with import). There are a few known issues:
- These builds are based on the Firefox trunk. As a result, any extensions which claim only 1.5.0.* compatibility will be disabled.
- If you use the installer, you have to do a custom install and disable Quality Feedback Agent. Otherwise, the installation will error out.
- Existing bookmarks are imported, but history is not yet imported.
- Bookmark keywords do not work yet.
- If your profile directory is on NFS, you will see slower performance.