What Places Have You Bookmarked?

Some people might remember that I had worked on the places history support we shipped in SeaMonkey 2.0 (as a side note, congrats to the Camino folks for making the jump as well).

Now I've done work on the next step, converting bookmarks to places:



I have the first part of the patch up in the place bookmarks bug report, which doesn't implement anything really visible yet, though.

There's a lot of work in this work I have done here, there are a few flaws left, and even when it lands, this is a start, not a final state of our reworked bookmarks support.
There are a lot of things we can and should improve in followup bugs, I have some ideas on that and I know other people in the community have as well - esp. in those few areas where the old bookmarks system has features the new system can't offer. And we will be working on those and accepting patches, of course.

We will do this change though, as there are a number of things the places bookmarks system can offer that the old system can't.

Here's a some of the improvements I currently know about:

• Live bookmarks, i.e. displaying feeds as "virtual" bookmark folders,
• Microsummary support, or "live titles", allowing (optional) bookmark titles that are dynamically being updated with info from the website itself,
• Bookmark tagging as an additional possibility of organizing bookmarks,
• More robust storage for bookmarks (including good recovery options),
• "Smart folders", e.g. "recently bookmarked pages", as well as saving bookmarks queries as virtual folders,
• Bookmark icons are working much better and not being lost when they expire from the browser cache,
• More code sharing, meaning code will be actively maintained and developed, which hasn't been fully the case with the older code,
• Possibility to sync bookmarks (between different SeaMonkey installation, but also Firefox or Fennec ones) via Weave Sync,
• Easier porting of bookmarks-related Firefox add-ons to SeaMonkey,
• And probably more.

The following "feature losses" or changes to the old code are noteworthy:

• "Groupmarks" are being replaced by being able to open any bookmark folder in tabs (middle-clicking a folder title or selecting the "Open All in Tabs" entry from the folder display),
• The bookmarks.html file can still be exported to, even automatically at application shutdown, but it's not the main storage format any more. Most usages of the file can be replaced, including using it as the homepage (the sidebar panel can be set instead), but what doesn't work is switching between different bookmarks.html files as bookmarks sources. I strongly believe most use cases for that can be somewhat differently be achieved through the means of the places system, but we unfortunately don't yet have too good descriptions of those use cases and why this "feature" (I'd call it "misuse") is quite popular among a number of people.
• Sharing bookmarks.html between multiple installations doesn't work any more, but using Weave Sync should bring almost the same experience.

Note that it's intentional that we are doing this early in SeaMonkey 2.1 development so we can improve the code further based on feedback from testers. Also, we're not completely mirroring Firefox, as we're keeping history and bookmarks as separate windows, and our bookmarks organizer looks much more like our standard SeaMonkey windows. We keep the bookmarks button in the personal toolbar (which of course can be removed with the customize toolbar feature).

The work in progress I have on my desktop is so far doing quite well, almost everything is working fine, with the exception of HTML import/export (needs the relevant service to move to toolkit) and the keyword feature in the location bar (places supports it, I just haven't yet found out how to hook it up).

We will have places bookmarks in SeaMonkey 2.1, with a good number of additional features, and it's progressing well. We are trying to keep the inconveniences low for people losing something they used, please let's help together to pull this off and make it a good experience for everyone.

A lot of work is still to be done, let's work together, help each other and make it an experience that is as good as it possibly can be!