Bug#639748: chromium: please add a side pane for bookmarks (like the one in Galeon)

[Francesco Poli]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:15:31 -0500 Jonathan Nieder wrote:

[...]
> Hi Francesco!

Hi Jonathan!

> 
> Francesco Poli (wintermute) wrote:
> 
> > While trying out Chromium, I noticed that the way to access bookmarks
> > is terribly slow and uncomfortable: the bookmarks bar shown in the
> > "new tab page" (or always shown, if you check "Always show the bookmarks
> > bar" in the preferences) only makes the first few bookmark folders visible;
> [...]
> > All this is really slow and unpractical, especially if you have a good
> > number of bookmarks.
> 
> If you hit Ctrl+Shift+O,

I tried to hit [Ctrl+Shift+O], but nothing happened...

> then you get access to a "bookmark manager"
> with search and everything.

I saw the bookmark manager (even though it does not seem to show up,
when I hit [Ctrl+Shift+O]), but it's no real substitute for the
bookmark side pane.
It takes one whole tab, rather than a side portion of the window, and
it's not visible when you visit a web site on one of the active tabs.

> But practically speaking, what I would
> encourage is to put the permanent bookmarks that need to be nicely
> organized on a webpage (either local or public) and use the "Bookmark
> this page" feature just as a way to save a few interesting pages that
> you were reading recently or that you frequently need to open in a new
> tab.

This would be a huge step back with respect to all the other modern web
browsers I've seen around.
I tried to do that back in the 1990s, when I was still a sad Windows
user (!) and browsed the web with Internet Explorer (!): well, it
doesn't scale! As soon as you collect a good number of bookmarks, which
you have to update and expand, the manual modification of the HTML code
is unpractical and time consuming.
One could set up some more automated system, sure.
But, hey, this should be the job of the web browser!
And it is, for every modern web browser that I know of.
Except for Chromium, which seems to still be at the "stone age" of
bookmark access...   :-(

> 
> In other words, these aren't necessarily the kind of bookmark you are
> used to. :)

OK, then Chromium basically lacks the modern (and useful) kind of
bookmarks.
I think that this is a very embarrassing gap for a modern web browser.

> 
> [...]
> > What I would really love seeing implemented in Chromium is a side pane
> 
> Chromium doesn't currently have any side panes.  Even the developer
> tools open in a separate window, so I guess that would be more
> consistent with what you are looking for.
> 
> Please feel free to report this at http://crbug.com/ and let us know
> the bug number if you want to pursue it.

It seems that I am required to create a Google account to report bugs
at http://crbug.com/ : I am not going to create one, as I am too
concerned for its privacy issues.
Normally I would ask you to forward my bug upstream, but here the
situation is different.
I've done a quick web search and it seems that there are lots of users
that lack this feature and most of them won't switch to Google Chrome or
Chromium until this feature is implemented.

http://www.thechromesource.com/the-people-want-a-chrome-bookmarks-side-bar/
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=4c5bdb5b16092e68&hl=en
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20785
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=45365

You can probably consider either of the last two URLs as a good
approximation of a forwarded version of my bug report.

This feature request has already been re-iterated many many times to
the upstream developers, but, surprisingly, they seem to refuse to
implement it.

If this is how Chromium upstream developers deal with very popular
feature requests, I do not dare imagine how they deal with minority
ones.
Maybe I must search for another (primary) web browser to switch
to...   :-(

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