Places

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Tracked by: bug 317841

Goals & Objectives

The primary objectives of this project are to:

• Improve access to History and Bookmarks
• Make it easier for people to Bookmark pages

Secondary objectives include:

• Consolidating user data formats
• Provide a platform for using interesting per-URL metadata
• Improving the capabilities of Live Bookmarks

Planned Milestones

Weekly builds. Content TBD.

Overview

Implement new back ends for Bookmarks and History using the mozStorage system. Develop newer, more usable front end components to display results, emphasizing simple search and categorization.

Background

Studies from the late 1990s show that while revisitations of pages previously seen counted for roughly 39% of all page navigations (see Google Scholar), Bookmarks and History usage was low (1-3%), despite the fact that roughly 20% of those revisitations were to pages seen > 10 URLs ago (and thus outside the usefulness range of the Back button or menu).

Autocomplete in the URL bar is a useful tool but fails to address some common desires when looking up visited pages. There is a gulf between the capabilities of that tool, the capabilities of the Bookmarks and History systems today, and the desired capabilities of those systems.

Use Cases

TBD.

Functional Requirements

TBD, but reasonable compatibility with Firefox 1.x

Plans & Design Documents

Desgin Documents

• Places:User Interface
• Places:Design Overview

• Places:URL Store
• Places:Bookmarks
• Places:Query System
• Places:place URIs
• Places:Results
• Places:Controller
• Places:RDF Wrapper

= Special Containers

• Places:Live Bookmarks
• Places:File System Container

More to come...

Code Location

mozilla/browser/components/places/

for the most part. Build with --enable-places in your .mozconfig file. This development is happening in-place on the trunk, so to avoid conflicting with the browser and causing bustage, there are some shims in place that overlay the browser to insert the Places UI access points.

Team

• Places:Task List

API Changes Required

The APIs for accessing Bookmarks and History will be replaced. APIs abstracting the layout of the metadata tables used in the profile storarge file will be provided. See above for details.

• Places:History API
• Places:Bookmarks API
• Places:Annotations API

Impact

Extensions

The APIs for accessing and manipulating Bookmarks and History are being replaced with new ones, and almost all Bookmarks and History user interface will be replaced or updated significantly. Any extension that does anything with History or Bookmarks will almost certainly have to be rewritten, at the very least to use the new APIs.

Discussion & Implications

Discussion Elsewhere

Intelligent Bookmarking (Draft) - Robert Accettura

Evolution of Bookmarking -- Bookmarks, Firefox, del.icio.us, Tagging, and Information Management