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Comment by childintime | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed. There is so much low hanging fruit in the GUI department:

- have bookmarks/history stay on the page you open it on (and no other)

- have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style

- option to collapse tabs into a page (tab)

- make the "tabs window" (the downward arrow after +) a tab, so the tabs can be sorted, searched in, or copied from, as html, to a file (I now get a rather useless list of 100 tabs)

- have navigation to all of these pages, along with recent Downloads and options like Help and New Private Tab, right from the New Tab page, and leave the hamburger menu for page specific actions.

And more. But even without Firefox is a great browser.

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Yes, I can't believe Firefox is still using a 15 years old bookmark/history dialog with atrocious UI. Completely unusable for anything but the most superficial inspection of your browsing history.

They recently removed bookmark descriptions and the justification I read was that it was old code and hard to maintain, so maybe we're lucky and they'll improve that UI next.

What do you dislike about it? Specifically, what about it makes it "unusable" for bookmark management, and what UI changes would constitute an improvement?

I strongly prefer it to the apparent alternative, which seems to be an HTML-native interface in a tab. In fact I think doing that to preferences (about:preferences) was a step in the wrong direction. Not only is the result rather ugly (IMHO), I'm constantly losing my preferences tab among my other tabs, whereas a separate window with a native UI has a single instance (more appropriate for preferences) and doesn't get commingled with web pages.

> - have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style

These are accessible at:

- chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

- chrome://browser/content/places/historySidebar.xhtml

- chrome://browser/content/places/bookmarksSidebar.xhtml

Not sure why they're not shown as tabs by default like the rest of Firefox's menus.

> have bookmarks and history occupy a full page

Ctrl+Shift+O and Ctrl+Shift+H respectively.

And vertical tabs ... I can't install plugins on my work managed machine like Tab Trees or whatever.

They also need some tab grouping thing like Chrome, which ironically they pioneered but abandoned.

> have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style

I would hate that very much because I don't see the necessity for a whole page.

> - make the "tabs window" (the downward arrow after +) a tab, so the tabs can be sorted, searched in, or copied from, as html, to a file (I now get a rather useless list of 100 tabs)

If you go to about:performance, you can double-click on a Tab entry, and it will jump you to that tab.

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