Re: Browser re-org

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 11:36 -0400, Adam Hooper wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 11:11 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote:
> > So, from all of this I've started to conclude that bookmarks as we,
> > and firefox use them are becoming a burden on people and no longer
> > useful.
> 
> Just an aside: Epiphany's bookmarks menu is not the intended way to
> access bookmarks. Users are meant to just type stuff into the location
> bar and select the bookmark from the dropdown. (Compare this to Firefox,
> in which the bookmarks *are* meant to be accessed in a menu
> hierarchy....)

Ok, this is where I'd like to try some new stuff.  I didn't know that's
how epiphany is supposed to work until just now.  I've done that, but
the problem is that it only seems to work against the bookmark name that
I gave it, which usually isn't well thought out and I never remember it.

Part of what I'd like to do is save parts of your history up until you
bookmark something so that the text and search terms you use are
registered with that bookmark.

> That's not to say that Epiphany's bookmarks system is perfect, but I
> think more and more people are coming to realize that it's better than
> Firefox's. Unless they try to use the menu hierarchy, which has always
> sucked in every browser and sucks even more in Epiphany (but if Peter
> Harvey's patch makes it in, Epiphany's will suck way less).

I'd like to remove the idea of bookmark management completely.  The same
way gmail has removed the way I used to use folders to organize my mail.
There are still labels for me to categorize things, but I don't bother
with those too much.  Search is a much easier way to find my mail in
gmail.  I think epiphany can use this same trick.

Bookmarking doesn't go away really, it's just a way of saying "This is
the interesting page I was looking for and would like to find again."
However when you search for that page again you can find any of the
pages leading up to the bookmarking and also see the bookmarked page.

> 1. There's a lot of parallel with Beagle here. Beagle can already index
> web pages... and though we don't have a beagle-feeding extension for
> Epiphany, it would be quite trivial to make one.

Yes, but Beagle won't be aware of the history/progression you used to
get to a new bookmark.  I think this is a truly important piece that out
weighs the value of just indexing the page information.  The real idea
is the let the person search for anything they might have seen before,
and show them how they progressed from any of those points.

> 2. There is a lot of garbage in a user's history. Extending your use
> case: when you searched for a PyGTK tutorial, you probably came across
> five bad ones before you found the one you liked. So you'd need a way to
> mark a page as "I like this page", or something along those lines,
> otherwise your history search results would be just as bad as Google's.

Yep, that's I think you're talking about keeping the bookmarks around,
which I totally agree.  

I'm finishing up a little animated mockup of what I've been working
towards and I'll send a link to that soon.

Cheers,
~ Bryan