About the quick search bookmarks in Firefox

[Lei Ming]

Hi, this is for bug #36941 on Launchpad.

I've read Ian's explanation, but I don't quite agree with him and I
still think it's better not to remove the quick search bookmarks.
Reasons:

A They work properly for most cases.

B Using quick search bookmarks (QS) is much faster than search box (SB)
because you don't need to use mouse to select the searching services
from the drop-down list then switch back to keyboard to type the search
string. If you often use different searching services (I personally
switch between wikipedia and google frequently), that means a lot of
pointing and clicks.

C QS is more convenient than SB because typing "wp" in the location box
is much easier than selecting Wikipedia from the (long) drop-down list
using the mouse (small things are difficult to select).

D The location box is much longer than the SB. When you search for long
strings, you can not see the whole string in the SB, and you must scroll
the text left/right to check if there are mistakes. It's even more
troublesome when you paste text into the SB.

E SB is not complete. For example, there is no SB entry that is
equivalent to the "quote" keyword in the QS. 

F It's easier to add new entries to the QS than to the SB.

G I don't think the QS will clutter up the bookmark too much. They are
in their own folder, adding only one entry to the top-level bookmark. If
we want to remove some thing from the bookmark, I'd rather remove the
"Firefox and Mozilla Links" folder and put it on the default start-up
page or even in the GNOME menu. Anyway, if the user really thinks the QS
is useless, he can remove them easily, only two clicks. In the contrary,
if we don't provide the QS by default and the user do want the QS,
adding them back is not an easy task for average users, IMHO.

H Some users may have used the official Firefox release (from the web
site) before. I think they will be confused because there is no QS in
Ubuntu's Firefox.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Lei Ming