1050596 - Firefox UI has too many ways to search?

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Attachment: Screenshot of tweet

I just saw this tweet by mpt:

https://twitter.com/mpt/status/497285294644002816/photo/1

Sarcasm aside, I think he might have a point. By default, the user is being shown 3 search inputs any time they open up a browser at about:home, or open a new tab at about:newtab.

That's a lot of redundancy. I know search is a very common activity that many of our users find useful, but I wonder if this is overkill. Not sure if / how we want to address the redundancy, but I did want to get this on file.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Kerensa [:bkerensa]]

I have never used the search box labeled Google FWIW so maybe we could just remove that?

Comment 2

[Lars Gusowski [:lagu]]

I doesn't use the search box to, cause the adress box is a search field to.
If we remove the search box, we should give the users a new possibility to change the search engine in the url bar directly or in the options.

Comment 3

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

[Thanks, Mike.]

The search field in the New Tab page appeared sometime between Firefox 28 and 31. Why? Is it because Chrome just added an extra search field to their equivalent page? ;-) Or is it because testing showed people are missing the existing search field? If the latter, adding another third search-enabled field probably is not the best solution. There are many ways you could draw attention to the existing search field when on the New Tab page.

Comment 4

[Lars Gusowski [:lagu]]

As i remember the reason was, that much people open a new tab and then browse to a search engine like google.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I think most of this is biased by personal expertise.

If I look at my parents workflow, they just look at content. They don't know what's the locationbar, and they ignore the searchbar. Chrome basically is just a decorator for The Internet. They only type in search fields they see in content pages (that is usually about:home or google).
Whoever thinks the in-content search fields are redundant should for a little while forget his expertize, cause we have many nontechnical users, likely the majority.

More technical persons will likely use the search bar or locationbar, but again the privacy scared people won't like the searchbar to be removed, cause then the locationbar should send suggestions requests to google.

As I see it, this is just a way to provide something useful to each branch of users.
Hard to satisfy millions users eh?

Comment 6

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

There has been filed a telemetry probe bug concerning search usage filed some time ago I cannot find right now.
Its results in - IMHO 1-1,5 years would provide valid measure points and then crazy conclusions/solutions could be derived from it.

This should go INVALID (since current state is intended) before it spreads out.

Comment 7

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Yeah, you know what, this isn't a good bug. This should be a discussion on a mailing list. I'm closing this out as INVALID, and I'm going to kick off a thread on firefox-dev.

Comment 8

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Discussion moved to: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firefox-dev/Rs8LjZEuFdg