Easy for Mozilla to make Go/Show Parent Folder be native?

[ttggzz]

Hi, I may go ranting at Mozilla when I find the right venue, but first I was wondering would anyone happen to know is it something hugely difficult for Mozilla to add show parent folder/go parent folder to the existing library search? I read something about the developers were pushing the "tags" idea, which I have no interest in, and if they're not doing it simply to "stick to their guns" on this issue I want to vent my feelings on that. Have well over 10,000 bookmarks pretty well organized and we just lost the add-ons that would show you where they were located when found in a search. thanks for any info

[TheVisitor]

Go here https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/

No Mozilla Devs hang here and we are NOT mozilla, we are users helping users... See over there ---------------------------------->

[ttggzz]

OK, thanks, I see the link is a venue to contact Mozilla about issues, I'll start there when ready. Yes, I understand mozillazine is not Mozilla, just wondered if anyone would happen to know how difficult it would be for them to add this feature. It's been requested for a long time. I'll root around over at the Mozilla site, thanks

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/

[Gingerbread Man]

Hello,

is it something hugely difficult for Mozilla to add show parent folder/go parent folder to the existing library search?

Maybe there's just no available staff to fix it? The Firefox codebase is huge, and the number of developers compared to similar projects is a tiny fraction. Mozilla is not Google, resources are limited.

Now, continued advocacy won't bring us anywhere, but this is open source, so if anyone has time to contribute a well made fix, that'll be welcome. Otherwise it will be fixed when some dev finds the time to fix it, or when a bookmarking experience redesign will be resourced.

Then someone tried to just submit the code from the "Show Parent Folder" add-on After rejecting the code due to its performance implications, it was recommended for contributors to instead focus their efforts on bug 469441 ("Go to Parent Folder" in the context menu). No activity on that since then.

Personally, I'm not particularly impressed with the "We're just a little itty bitty underdog company" shtick when the fact is higher-ups can assign resources as they please. The fact that their priorities don't align with user needs is why after all these years Firefox lacks basic must-haves, like a default zoom level.

I read something about the developers were pushing the "tags" idea

How many years ago was this? Tags aren't even saved when you export bookmarks as HTML. It's the same old Mozilla development cycle: introduce incomplete feature → don't fix it → users don't like it because it's buggy → propose its removal because it's not being used. Thankfully, the proposal to remove tag support was rejected in 2012, so it lives on, at least for a while longer.

[DanRaisch]

Don't be surprised if your search on Mozilla Support offers no more satisfaction. It's staffed by volunteers, just as these forums are. Also, there are probably as many requests to have the functionality of a hundred other extensions added to the core code as there are for Go/Show Parent Folder. Adding all of them would result in a huge/bloated installer.

[ttggzz]

Thanks GingerBread Man, the tag thing was a long time ago, just referencing my understanding of why show parent folder wasn't in there ages ago. Thanks for the info. I find this issue mind boggling. It's like if you searched for a town or a street in USA and the results didn't show you what State it was in!

[ttggzz]

Thanks DanRaisch, yes I won't expect too much, but want to make an informed pitch. Showing where a bookmark resides, especially if you have thousands or tens of thousands of them, seems to me like a pretty basic search function. Like I said, it's like finding a street on a map but it doesn't show you what town it's in.

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome. Just wanted to ensure that expectations were reasonable.

[the-edmeister]

Thanks GingerBread Man, the tag thing was a long time ago, just referencing my understanding of why show parent folder wasn't in there ages ago. Thanks for the info. I find this issue mind boggling. It's like if you searched for a town or a street in USA and the results didn't show you what State it was in!

Tags for categorizing Bookmarks is a feature that was introduced with Firefox 3.0 all the way back in June 2008. And the intention of Tags was help users find individual bookmarks more easily by topic/s the user associated with each bookmark as they saved each new bookmark. IMO, the developers of Tags were too smart in their thinking, well above the intellectual level of the majority of Firefox users, or internet users in general.

I never "got with the program" by using the Tags feature. I found that too many of my bookmarks had become useless after a couple of years, I learned that via an extension that checked all bookmarks to see if they still led to an actual webpage or were "dead links". Until "Places" in Fx 3.0 I was using AM-Deadlink to check for "dead links"; and after AM-Deadlink didn't work in Firefox any longer there was an extension for Firefox made. Plus I found that I used less than 10% of the Bookmarks that I had saved - after saving them, the other 90% were just making it harder to locate the Bookmarks that I actually used. Sooo, I kept using Folders for categorizing my Bookmarks and saving new Bookmarks to multiple folders as necessary when the new Bookmark pertained to multiple personal interests of mine. "Electronics" Bookmarks made it into D-I-Y projects, Autos, Computers, etc. And don't say Firefox doesn't allow the user to save a Bookmark more than once; drag'n'drop to save a Bookmark is the "trick" to save the same Bookmark as many times as you want. Oh, and I never "fell for" the stupid "Star" button and the Bookmarks drop-down menus that seem to close way too fast; the Bookmarks Sidebar works as good in Firefox 57 as it did in Phoenix 0.3 and like it did in Opera and IE 5.5 which I used before switching to Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox in 2002.

As far a search for folders, that has never been a part of Firefox (even before Fx 3) and we users have always needed an extension to do that. From time to time as new "major changes" came to Firefox that broke the existing Bookmarks Folder Search extension/s it took a while for those extensions to be updated or rewritten, or for a different extension developer to create a compatible version. So now with Firefox 57 we are in that type of situation, again.

Have you looked and searched Bugzilla to see if someone proposed that Mozilla include a Go / Show Parent Folder feature in Firefox to eliminate the need for using an extension??

Chances are you will find a Bug report like that from many years ago that was marked WONT FIX, with the reason that the Firefox developers decided not to include a feature like Go / Show Parent Folder. And I wouldn't be surprised if that feature was part of multiple different Bug reports, with all but one classified as a duplicate and link to the original Bug report.

.

[ttggzz]

.[/quote]

Tags for categorizing Bookmarks is a feature that was introduced with Firefox 3.0

Thanks the edmeister, I started with I believe FF 3.6, my tags comment was memory of looking into it back then and recent search probably finding old posts. I didn't use it back then, went immediately to a folder system.

IMO, the developers of Tags were too smart in their thinking, well above the intellectual level of the majority of Firefox users, or internet users in general.

I recall more or less "getting it", but my eyes were glazing over as well when reading about it. I did try tagging a few things and if I recall correctly it seemed really tedious as opposed to just dragging the url into a folder [I have a great trackball mouse that's executes it perfectly].

Have you looked and searched Bugzilla to see if someone proposed that Mozilla include a Go / Show Parent Folder feature in Firefox to eliminate the need for using an extension??

Chances are you will find a Bug report like that from many years ago that was marked WONT FIX, with the reason that the Firefox developers decided not to include a feature like Go / Show Parent Folder. And I wouldn't be surprised if that feature was part of multiple different Bug reports, with all but one classified as a duplicate and link to the original Bug report.

I didn't search Bugzilla [yet], but was led to some threads by duckduckgo search. Started 15 years ago, last comment 5 days ago:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196509

In my opinion the lack of show/go parent folder is not like some special needs/personal preference thing [like colored tabs or something like that]; it's an incomplete execution of the current library search function! Trying to come up with analogies, it's like searching a book for fragments of a phrase, the search finds the phrase for you but will not reveal the page or chapter! You'd have to go through the whole book to find it.

Or a 2 acre warehouse with 3 million items in it. Search will teleport the item into your office, but never ever show you what shelf or zone it's in so you can go there and root around.

I may be losing steam on this, just wait for someone to come up with a new add on. I did find a bunch of recent comments desiring it. The link posted earlier to filing complaints/praise looks like a good way to just post something to vent my preference.

My favorite library thing of some years is having the library open as a pinned tab in any window I need it. I dropped using the sidebar or the library page itself a long time ago.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/974185

[ttggzz]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196509

I was just mucking around in the comments at the end of that thread. Seems many agree, this is a truly bizarre omission in a library search. I hope an add on comes along soon.