Re: [HIG] DISCUSSION: Section 53: Keyboard Interaction Basics: Add bookmark shortcut

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > We investigated this when we had the same discussion for Galeon
> > (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57838). It turned out most
> > popular and modern browsers use Control+B to open the bookmarks editor,
> > and Control+D to add a bookmark. Nautilus simply has no bookmarks
> > editor, so that might be the reason why Control+B became "Add bookmark".
> 
> Nautilus does have a bookmark editor,

Oops, sorry about my mistake.


> but the bookmark editor doesn't have a keyboard shortcut since it's not
> a very commonly used feature.

Maybe not in Nautilus, but rearranging bookmarks is a common action in
more specialized web browsers. It might not be as commonly used as
adding bookmarks, but once they become more than a handful, they tend to
become less useful if they are not arranged somehow. And rearranging and
deleting bookmarks is the primary use of a bookmarks editor.


> > If you follow the discussions of that report, you'll see that it's not
> > really a question of Nautilus versus Mozilla, it's Nautilus and
> > Konqueror versus Galeon, Mozilla, Netscape and Internet Explorer. In my
> > opinion, compability with the second group of browsers in this case will
> > make most users feel at home.
> 
> That makes some sense, but I really think Control+B is much more
> obvious and it's weird to have it assigned to the less common "Edit
> Bookmarks..." operation rather than the extremely common "Add
> Bookmark" operation. Whoever decided that at Microsoft (I'm pretty
> sure this comes from IE originally) was on some big-time crack.

I suspect that IE borrowed it from Netscape at some point. And so on...

Nevertheless, it hardly makes sense to break this because we think it's
slightly more logical some other way. It's only logical for English
anyway, many international users couldn't care less what the letters of
the shortcuts are, as long as they are the same between applications.


> > <B>ookmarks Editor, a thing that most sane web browsers (except
> > Nautilus) have? ;-)
> 
> Did you even bother to check before you wrote this email?

Nope, I relied on my (faulty) memory. Please see my apology above.


Christian