Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Andreas Gal]

What happens when a user types letters into the Google search box we ship by 
default in Firefox?

Thanks,

Andreas

> On Oct 27, 2014, at 12:08 AM, Karl Dubost  wrote:
> 
> In Firefox 2.2.0, each time you try to enter a letter, there are a list of 
> icons displayed which seems to be delivered by Everything.me.
> 
> I see two issues:
> 
> 1. experience-wise it is annoying to have the flickering of icons for each 
> letter typed.
> 
> 2. It seems to be a change of policy in terms of sharing data the user type 
> in the URL bar. Is there a possibility to put that off and not having 
> whatever you type up there to be sent somewhere the user does not expect?
> 
> Maybe there are bugs for this.
> Thanks.
> 
> -- 
> Karl Dubost, Mozilla
> http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz
> 
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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Karl Dubost]

Andreas,

Le 27 oct. 2014 à 08:15, Andreas Gal  a écrit :
> What happens when a user types letters into the Google search box we ship by 
> default in Firefox?

Do you mean desktop? Sorry I was not clear, but I was talking about Firefox OS.
But that seems unrelated to everything.me


About Desktop:
* For Google search box on Desktop, I suspect the one which is available in the 
initial tab (center of the page) is also sending XHR requests to Google for 
each letter.
* For the URL bar, it seems it does not send anything. At least it doesn't 
suggest anything. It will send to Google keywords which are not URIs, once you 
have typed "enter"

At least that is my understanding.


-- 
Karl Dubost, Mozilla
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz

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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Andreas Gal]

> On Oct 27, 2014, at 1:16 AM, Karl Dubost  wrote:
> 
> Andreas,
> 
> Le 27 oct. 2014 à 08:15, Andreas Gal  a écrit :
>> What happens when a user types letters into the Google search box we ship by 
>> default in Firefox?
> 
> Do you mean desktop? Sorry I was not clear, but I was talking about Firefox 
> OS.
> But that seems unrelated to everything.me
> 
> 
> About Desktop:
> * For Google search box on Desktop, I suspect the one which is available in 
> the initial tab (center of the page) is also sending XHR requests to Google 
> for each letter.
> * For the URL bar, it seems it does not send anything. At least it doesn't 
> suggest anything. It will send to Google keywords which are not URIs, once 
> you have typed "enter"
> 
> At least that is my understanding.

So we send an XHR request for each letter to Google on Desktop (search box), 
and XHR requests to e.me  on Firefox OS. How are these cases 
different. Are they both a problem? I am just trying to understand the exact 
nature of your concern.

Thanks,

Andreas

> 
> 
> -- 
> Karl Dubost, Mozilla
> http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz
> 

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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Karl Dubost]

Andreas,

Le 27 oct. 2014 à 09:30, Andreas Gal  a écrit :
> So we send an XHR request for each letter to Google on Desktop (search box), 
> and XHR requests to e.me on Firefox OS. How are these cases different. Are 
> they both a problem? I am just trying to understand the exact nature of your 
> concern.

OK quoting myself.

Le 27 oct. 2014 à 08:08, Karl Dubost  a écrit :
> 1. experience-wise it is annoying to have the flickering of icons for each 
> letter typed.

Poor user experience. This might be solvable.


> 2. It seems to be a change of policy in terms of sharing data the user type 
> in the URL bar. Is there a possibility to put that off and not having 
> whatever you type up there to be sent somewhere the user does not expect?

The nature of concerns here is two folds:

1. Can users deactivate everything.me ? 
   Users can change the default search engine on Firefox Desktop. Users have 
the choice to never use or use only $SEARCH_ENGINE_BRAND if they wish so. 
That's a cool feature: Have the choice.

2. Change of expectations.
   A user which was using Firefox OS 1.0 to 1.3 could use the search feature of 
everything.me OR the browser URL bar. Now the user has only one bar which is 
sending data to a service which he/she didn't opt-in. (A bit what is happening 
with Spotlight on 10.10)


The issue is never to propose a feature. That is cool if people need it. The 
issue is more:
1. To make the feature without the choice to not deactivate it.
2. To change expectations on the sharing perimeter of a feature.


Does it make more sense? ^_^ (maybe my French is getting into the way).


-- 
Karl Dubost, Mozilla
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz

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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Gabriele Svelto]

On 27/10/2014 08:08, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 2. It seems to be a change of policy in terms of sharing data the user type 
> in the URL bar. Is there a possibility to put that off and not having 
> whatever you type up there to be sent somewhere the user does not expect?

Yes, suggestions can be disabled from the settings app: go into Settings
> Search and turn off "Search Suggestions". This should stop search
suggestions from the URL/RocketBar while giving you the possibility of
manually starting a search.

 Gabriele




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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Karl Dubost]

Gabriele,


Le 27 oct. 2014 à 09:48, Gabriele Svelto  a écrit :
> Yes, suggestions can be disabled from the settings app: go into Settings
> Search and turn off "Search Suggestions". 

Thanks! Very useful.

So that solves one part of the issues. Very cool. I had completely missed it.
Next time someone is asking me, I can inform them.

The two other issues:
1. Being usability (performance on flickering) Bug number?
2. Change of expectations. More difficult I guess. Maybe during the intro after 
updating to a new version, explaining the new features and their consequences.

Thanks again.

-- 
Karl Dubost, Mozilla
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz

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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Gabriele Svelto]

On 27/10/2014 09:55, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 1. Being usability (performance on flickering) Bug number?

We've got bug 1027381 [1] though we might want to introduce a mechanism
to also throttle the requests we send (and drawing the spinner which
takes a huge amount of CPU time slowing down the user). I had
implemented a simple solution for the old browser search bar in bug
985369 [2], it could be used as an inspiration for improving the
Rocketbar search though as I mentioned above one would need to do more
there than simple throttling because the spinner alone is a huge drag on
performance.

 Gabriele

[1] [SCR][Rocketbar] Can we do a reduction of flashing via a comparison
with this found set versus last found set?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027381
[2] Writing into the URL bar consumes 100% CPU time
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=985369



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Re: Firefox 2.2.0 and everything.me

[Ben Francis]

+dev-gaia

I only just came across this thread as I don't follow dev-platform very
closely, dev-gaia is a better place to discuss issues about Gaia. Comments
inline...

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Karl Dubost  wrote:

> In Firefox 2.2.0, each time you try to enter a letter, there are a list of
> icons displayed which seems to be delivered by Everything.me.
>

Note: This is the case for 2.1, the UI could change in 2.2.


>
> I see two issues:
>
> 1. experience-wise it is annoying to have the flickering of icons for each
> letter typed.
>

I agree, and I think this is something we can improve through UI changes
and better caching in 2.2.

In the old browser app we kept a local cache of icons in IndexedDB and kept
a "result cache" of results in memory as you type to help with performance.
The new search app doesn't cache things so explicitly which I think harms
performance, but the search app is quite different because only one of the
results is local (from browsing history), the rest come over the network
from EverythingMe and Firefox Marketplace.

This also has data consumption implications. A student from Bangladesh
pointed out to me that he is charged to "visit free web sites like Facebook
Zero" because typing in a URL uses data.


> 2. It seems to be a change of policy in terms of sharing data the user
> type in the URL bar. Is there a possibility to put that off and not having
> whatever you type up there to be sent somewhere the user does not expect?
>

See the discussion in bug 1082787. As I understand it, the privacy team has
signed off on this. It's only for one trusted partner whose privacy policy
has been reviewed, the user is informed of this behaviour on first use, and
are able to turn the feature off in Settings (which they weren't able to do
in 2.0). That's a good thing because from 2.1 this search bar doubles as
your URL bar.

I'm personally not keen on some parts of this design having dogfooded it
for a while, and I hope we can improve things in 2.2. I know that UX are
exploring different search UI concepts I think there are improvements we
can make on the engineering side too.

Personally I would have a preference for more local results from browsing
history as you type, and hide most of the remote results behind an explicit
web search by the user. But let's see what UX come up with :)


> Maybe there are bugs for this.
>

See bug 1082787 for the privacy issue. I'm not sure if there are bugs filed
yet for changes to the search UI in 2.2.

Stay tuned.

Ben
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