Bug: Single-clicking the Star icon saves bookmarks in an unpredictable folder (after Bug 1432604, if not showing the panel when creating bookmarks)
Status: NEW
Priority: P3
Created: 2021-02-09 14:59:57+00:00
Resolved: 2022-07-06 10:57:09+00:00

This bug is in reference to the changes to bookmarking made in Bug 1432604 and was requested to be filed by Bug 1432604 Comment 41.

Places in Firefox 3 changed how bookmarking worked: single-click Star to quickly file a bookmark in a known folder (originally called "Unfiled Bookmarks" now known as "Other Bookmarks"), double-click Star to move it into a specific folder. Bug 1432604 breaks this design.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit any web page.
2. Click Star icon in URL bar.
3. Open new tab or restart browser.
4. Open "Other Bookmarks" folder and try to find bookmark saved in step 2.

Actual Results:
The bookmark was not there, it had actually been saved in a "random" folder (the last folder I had explicitly saved a bookmark to a few days ago). I had to search my bookmarks to discover this, at first I thought bookmarking was just broken in the latest beta.

Expected Results:
For the past 13 years, since Firefox 3 / Places, the result of single-clicking the Star was to save a bookmark into "Other Bookmarks" (previously called "Unfiled Bookmarks" and then "Unsorted Bookmarks").

Notes:
This change regresses an explicitly designed UI feature of Places: single-click to quickly file a bookmark in a known folder (originally called "Unfiled Bookmarks" now known as "Other Bookmarks"), double-click to move it into a specific folder. Now a single click will put the bookmark in a "random" location (whichever folder I last happened to save a bookmark to). I'm using the term "random" because I don't keep track in my head of where I last saved a bookmark and I've been trained by the last 13 years of using Firefox to not need to look in the dropdown to find out which folder a bookmark was saved to since I always knew prior to this change. The end result is that Bookmarks just seem to disappear.

It was suggested in Bug 1432604 Comment 40 that this is not an issue because you just need to manually save a bookmark into "Other Bookmarks" once and then future bookmarks will also be saved there. However, this is only a solution if you never save bookmarks into any other folders. If you sometimes single-click star to save and other times use the dropdown to save to a different folder this will not work.

I believe this breaks a fundamental UI design principle, Predicatability, I can no longer predict where a Bookmark will be saved when single-clicking Star (unless I happen to remember the folder I saved my last bookmark into).

I can see two possible workarounds for the user, neither ideal:
1. Never just single-click and move on. Instead always bring up the dropdown and check where the bookmark has been saved and fix if necessary.
2. Never use the folder option in the dropdown. Instead save a bookmark to "Other Bookmarks" once and from then on only move bookmarks by dragging them in the Library and never by changing the folder in the dropdown.

Hopefully this explains the issue, please let me know if you need further information. Thanks.