On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Evan Martin <[email protected]> wrote:
> I believe both of these were caused by importing search keywords from > Firefox. Yes. In at least the latter case, Matt_2 was unaware that the > "time" keyword even existed on his Firefox (I think it might have been > part how Firefox was installed on his computer?). In what I consider an incredibly boneheaded move, Google laptops ship a default Firefox profile that has "time" set up as a keyword search. 1) is importing keywords harmful? (I am pretty certain "ask the user > more questions when importing" *is* harmful.) I am going to assert without data here. Most Firefox users don't have keywords. Most of the ones that do have them set them up themselves, and not importing them is very bad (we saw this some during early internal testing, when we didn't do this). We as Googlers tend to hit the other case a lot, which is users that don't use and don't know about the keywords they do have, because our corporate deployment set them up. This could obviously affect other corporate deployment scenarios too, though I think the likelihood of a corporation setting up Firefox as the default browser, and prepackaging keywords with it, is fairly low for companies that aren't much like Google. Therefore, my belief is that the downsides of this come up rarely, whereas the downsides of _not_ doing it would be significantly more frequent (though still uncommon) and more irritating. 2) how can we surface the fact that you can edit those keywords? I thought our Options dialog used to have a "Manage search engines..." button, which I think was more clear than the current "Manage" button in the "Default search engine" section (which I agree makes it look like this is only for changing defaults). Perhaps a few changes here would make this more apparent. That said, I am not sure how widely I want to expose this. I think this is a pretty niche feature and I'm OK with people generally not knowing how to get there. As to Ojan's comment about integrating with bookmarks, I think the reason people expect things to be there is because that's how Firefox does this (since Firefox doesn't use keywords on search engines, but rather creates special bookmarks for these), and people who use these are often used to Firefox. It seems like there should be some way we can help these users, but I'm reluctant to just stow links in the bookmark manager like "Looking for search engines?" or something. Maybe we can create a single clearinghouse UI for everything relating to the omnibox (why did it just do what it did, and how can I customize/control that). This would be helpful both for these users and generally for debugging and tuning. Or we could provide context menu options on the omnibox suggestions like "Why is this here?" PK --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
