Redoing Undo?

[Perry Wagle]

I would like to fix undoing in firefox, and am wondering what all everyone else thinks should happen.  I have 5 months to do this, and I don’t want a wild goose chase, so I’m trying to check with you all first.


My personal focus is on undoing edits to the places database, but I might need to generalize a bit.

In June, the cancel button was removed from the individual bookmark editor.  I looked somewhat carefully at the code today and it doesn’t look to me like the code supporting the cancel button was removed, just the button itself.  I have an extension that permits you to resize that dialog window (its not resizable by default), and I can modify it to re-add the button, if I am correct.

First problem with this (advanced users only!) is that y’all might decide its dead code and remove it.  To head that off, I’d like to fix rollbacks in general.  So here I am, asking for what other people want from it.

Second problem is that no-one believes in tags.  That's because, by default, using tags is horrible.  The editor window is too small and unresizable, the tag list changes width as you scroll it, etc.  With my two extensions, tags are now (with ESR45) quite useful, and you can have minutes long sessions editing tags, making cancel a necessity.  Complex tagging requires undo and cancel, the subject of this note.


I have a complex vision of what I want rollbacks to do.  Including in a parallel environment.  To solidify that vision, I need to see what I can do with the actual code, and to find out what other people need and want.  One thing is that I want to know what an rollback is going to do before I do it.

Problems I hope to fix in the near term are (1) undo in the individual bookmark editor barely works at all, (2) advanced users of tags would want cancel, (3) you can’t tell what undo is doing in the edit-all-bookmarks window.

In the farther term, I’m working on ways to automate correction of errors and typos.  Cancel was my primary tool for eliminating them (empirically, it takes me a month instead of a week to not make errors in the first place, and thats very nerve-wracking).  I will be able to do better than that.


Advanced / power users are the source of innovations in your code base.  Kill them all off, and you die in 3-5 years.


If people think the above approaches a good idea, I will concentrate on fixing undo and have a concrete proposal in a week or two.


Thanks!

— Perry