Places

Places is a system for storing bookmarks, history, and other information about the Web. It is currently enabled in trunk builds, and debuted in Firefox 3. This document covers the design and user-interface of Places.

Quick links:

• Developer documentation on MDC
• Doxygen-generated API documentation
• Database schema ERD
• mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup
• #places on irc.mozilla.org

Timeline and History

• Initial Places implementation slated for Firefox 2. Landed for early alphas and then backed out and eventually cut from the release. [TODO: proper links and dates needed]
• Project re-initialized in fall 2007, slated for Firefox 3.
• History-on-Places was enabled on the trunk in January 2007, first released in Gran Paradiso Alpha 2.
• Bookmarks-on-Places was enabled in May 2007, first released in Gran Paradiso Alpha 5.

Goals & Objectives

The primary objectives:

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

Secondary objectives:

• Consolidating user data formats
• Providing a platform for using interesting per-URL metadata
• Improving the capabilities of Live Bookmarks
• Providing a solid architecture for bookmark sync and remote storage

Overview

Implemented new back ends for Bookmarks and History using the mozStorage wrapper for SQLite. Developed 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

• Places:History Use Cases
• Bookmarks Use Cases (not specific to places)

Functional Requirements

The original requirements for Places in Firefox 3 are detailed in the Firefox 3 PRD

Design

• Places:User Interface
• Places:Design Overview

• Places:URL Store
• Places:Bookmarks
• Places:place URIs
• Places:Results
• Places:Controller
• Browser History
• Places:AutoComplete
• Places:Transactions
• Places:Drag & Drop
• Places:Manager

More design information is on the Places developer wiki.

Implementation

Places is currently enabled for Firefox 3 and greater, powering History and Bookmarks, as well as providing plumbing for Livemarks, Annotations and Microsummaries and the Awesomebar.

Code Location

• Firefox front-end: mozilla/browser/components/places/
• Toolkit backend: mozilla/toolkit/components/places/

Team

• Dietrich Ayala
• Asaf Romano
• Neil Deakin
• Dan Mills
• Seth Spitzer

With help and guidance from:

• Brett Wilson (former backend contributor)
• Myk Melez (microsummaries)
• Robert Sayre (feeds)
• Mike Connor
• Alex Faaborg

See the Places bug list for current work.

Meetings/Discussion

• mozilla.dev.apps.firefox
• #places on irc
• Weekly meetings on Thursday at 2pm PST in #places. See Places/StatusMeetings for the logs of the past meetings.

API Changes

The APIs for accessing Bookmarks have been replaced. Some history APIs remain the same. See the Places developer wiki for more information.

• Places: History Service
• Places: Bookmarks Service
• Places: Annotation Service
• Places: Livemark Service
• Places: Favicon Service
• Places: Tagging Service

Special Containers

XXXdietrich - move to developer wiki, replace with an design page for extensibility

• Places:Bookmarks Containers
• Places:Live Bookmarks
• Places:File System Container

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.

Performance

See Places:Performance for more information.

Discussion & Implications

• Places Security Review

Discussion Elsewhere

• Intelligent Bookmarking (Draft) - Robert Accettura

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

• Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents, Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, May 6-10, 1996, Paris, France. (Google Scholar search for the article if it moves)

• Deb Richardson's "On Tagging"

• Comments from Todd Agulnick of Foxmarks
  • blog post
  • newsgroup thread on sync
  • ERD (possibly obsolete)