Downloader UI Rationales

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

First of all I sincerely apologize for not getting involved in this 
conversation from the beginning. Unfortunately school was a little nuts with 
finals and projects, but its done now :) 

So there are two majors changes we've made to the downloader ui in epiphany 
1.2. First we've added a default downloader folder to which all files 
downloaded via the context menu 'download link" action are saved to. In 
addition we've made click a link automatically open a linked file (if it is 
considered safe). 

I will address each change and its rationale seperately and we can continue 
the discussion from there. 

Default Download Directory and Download Link Behavior
-----------------------------------------------------
The change in the download link behavior had several motivations. First were 
some observations that I and I believe Xan had both made. Many users tend to 
download files to the same folder and then later organize their files. In 
fact one user that Xan worked with had explicitly mentioned to him that he 
found it kind of wierd that the ui kept asking him the same question when he 
tried to download more files (where to put this?) [1] 

The default download folder has a few advantages imo. First its less 
stressful on the user who doesn't want to micromanage everything. This is 
especially true of user who may be downloading multiple files at once (think 
lots of rpms from freshrpms). Continuously prompting the user for a folder 
to save to becomes annoying. Further evidence of this can be seen in all 
file sharing programs i've ever used. They all use the idea of a default 
downloads folder to facilitate fast downloading. Users can later go ahead 
and categorize, rename etc.[2] 

The important thing is to make access to the downloads folder fast. We 
really have two options here. Currently we are defaulting to the desktop. 
This decision to the best of my knowledge is really based upon i18n 
concerns. Honestly I'd much prefer a desktop subfolder called Downloads, but 
too many flame wars have erupted about using non-localized folder names. 

Its also been suggested that we should go even further and support multiple 
default folders based on mime types. While the idea is sound, the real 
solution to this issue is something akin to search folders implemented at a 
a level above of the traditional filesystem (medusa+storage). 

Anyway I at least find the current behavior much more usable, probably due 
to the fact that i'm not a micromanager. I don't really think we should add 
additional "save link as," as its somewhat redundant with download. Plus I'm 
fairly certain that the main user action on links are open and download 
(bookmarking is probably even a rare action here). 


Open Link Behavior
-----------------------------------------------------
I guess there has been concern about single click a link, opens documents in 
their specific application. I'm not really sure what the concern here is as 
long as we are sufficiently sane about the implementation. Obviously we 
don't want to automagically run scripts, executables etc. However it seems 
pretty sane to me at least that clicking a link automagically opens in a 
viewer. Every viewer should include save as functionality which should make 
saving the viewed file in the users filesystem area pretty trivial. My only 
real grievance with the current implementation is that it uses a temporary 
downloaded file instead of something like gnome_vfs_url_Show.[3] Other 
technical reasons exist probably too i suppose. 

Anyway lets talk more about this, and sorry for getting involved late in the 
discussion. 

dave 

[1] Xan I hope I'm not misrepresenting our IRC conversation from awhile back 
(I think it may have even been summer time). :)
[2] The file manager is a far superior interface for managing files than the 
file selector anyway.
[3] Although since gnome_vfs uses epiphany as the http:// handler this 
creates an interesting problem.