[Epiphany] Re: replacing the combo with and autocompleting textentry

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Marco Pesenti Gritti writes: 

> On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 13:04, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
>> Based on my understanding of how the new completion code works in gtk, I 
>> believe it is possible to have an autocomplete text entry without a 
>> combobox. This is really nice for a few reasons.  
>> 
>> First, my motivation for dropping the combo. Combo boxes are very odd 
>> looking widgets. The down arrow on one side makes them look unbalanced. 
>> Apple for instance has historically avoided combo boxes in its interfaces 
>> for this reason. (this shouldn't be considered a justification in itself, I 
>> will never except the reasoning of Apple does it so it must be right, but it 
>> is something to point out).  
>> 
>> Also I think the combo part of our address bar goes fairly unused. By fitts 
>> law we know that hitting a small target is very hard, hence i think very few 
>> users actually click the down arrow to get to browser history. Based on this 
>> assumption, I think we can fairly painlessly drop the combo in favor of an 
>> autocompleting text entry. I believe that this fits the 90% use case very 
>> well. Most users don't want random history results, but want results based 
>> on the page they are currently looking for, hence autcompleted history is 
>> very useful.  
>> 
>> Given our current menulayout the bookmark favorites in the go menu could be 
>> replaced by history items, if we believe that quick access to random history 
>> items is needed (I'm not quite sure this is even true).  
>> 
>> What are other peoples opinions. 
> 
> My opinion is that you need to stop to make me drop code two days after
> I wrote it :P

Oh common based on my really basic understanding of the api completion stuff 
is all part of gtkentry anyway so you just need to drop the combo itself :P 

> Seriously, I dont have a strong feeling, let's see what other things ...
> I think Greg thought it was not a good idea to drop it, so it's worth to
> talk with him too, I dont think he is subscribed here.

greg got an opinion? 

dave