Web browser needs "download, copy link" etceteras

[mcfletch]

The web browser currently doesn't allow for the "alternate" interaction types for links, seen typically as a right-click to bring up a set of choices such as "download", "copy url", "open in new tab" and the like.

There are lots of other cases where you want to be able to copy a link instead of following it, or you want to open a new window (or better yet, tab) with the new document.

[Eben]

This is already "solved" by the rollover palette design. The only details to figure out are what exactly belongs in the menu. Here's a first stab at it:

Primary rollover: Here we have 2 useful bits of info (usually). The primary text can be the link title (the string inside the a tag), and the secondary text can be the actual href inside the link. This gives us a functionality similar to the status bars in other browsers allowing the user to view the path attached to a link before following it. When creating the palette, we can check to be sure that the link string and the href string are different, and otherwise only show the primary rollover text.

Secondary rollover: Here we have a list of actions that can be performed on the link. A few I think are most useful in our browser are "Follow link", "Copy link", "Share Link", "Bookmark Link", "Download Linked File." This seems to cover the basics.

As another note, we really need to identify the various types of files that should be treated as downloads by default, and not rendered as plain text in the browser. This goes double for things like .xo objects and others that are designed for the laptops. We've actually even been talking about downloading .txt files by default, since the Read activity would actually provide a richer environment for viewing such files.

[Eben]

This preliminary design is enough to get the ball rolling. It can be tweaked to perfection later. Simon, is this something you can do since you've been working with the browser lately?

[Simon]

To take care of the installation of activity bundles we are not sure this would be the right solution since this should just work by clicking on it. The other things that needs to be solved for that are discussed in ticket 2716.

To handle general actions on links having this feature sounds good.

[marco]

We are past feature freeze...

[kimquirk]

Simon, Can you tell us what you would need to be able to install xol files from the web? This is really important for trial-3. If it is doable, I would like it to stay in trial-3. We really only have this week to get it done. thoughts?

[kimquirk]

Actually, there are other bugs that say we have to install xol from a browser. This bug says we have to be able to do standard right click things from a web browser. That piece of this bug can move to FRS. So I'm moving to FRS.

[erikos]

Since this is an enhancement i want to know if this is relevant for FRS. The download of xo and xol files is working already - so this is actually about general actions you may want to make on a link.

[Eben]

Updating the list of actions I think are appropriate:

• Follow link

• Bookmark
• (Offline bookmark)

• Copy link
• Download linked file

The line breaks indicate horizontal separators; the paren indicate an option we don't yet have. We shouldn't bother adding any separators until we have the offline bookmark functionality. Can anyone think of missing options? There's no "open in new tab" since we don't have tabs in the Browser, and I'm not sure that something analogous to "Open in new window" (Open in new instance?) is really that useful -- maybe -- but that has security implications and I don't think we can do it until we have support from Rainbow anyway.