Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 144345
Browsing for content handlers -gtk2 file open
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:57 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041228 Firefox/1.0 Fedora/1.0-8 Description of problem: Browsing for content handlers is absurdly slow with the Gtk2 File open dialog. It takes forever (45 secs-1min?) to index /usr/bin, which is the target location of basically all programs you'll be looking for. The Gtk2 file open dialog badly needs a bar where the user can type in the file. I can't understand why the gtk team would decide to remove it, but it's a bad idea, and at least firefox should have such a bar. Please add one, since without it the BROWSE button when opening content is completely useless. The "Change Action" dialog in the preferences when you click on different extension does what I want. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firefox-1.0-8 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. See summary Additional info:
What you are complaining about is not a firefox problem, but GTK itself. It was designed on purpose in that way, probably because their usability studies thinks that it is "best" that way. Yes it makes many people used to other interfaces uncomfortable including me. But it is the wrong place to complain here. You have to make your case to the upstream GTK and GNOME projects.
Yes, but there's nothing stopping you from having a bar *and* a browse dialog in firefox. In fact, that's what the "Change Action" dialog already does. If the dialog doesn't provide the functionality that is needed, it seems that a bar should be added as well. I'll probably complain on GNOME bugzilla about the treeview performance.
AFAIK that is not even an option in the new GTK file chooser. Or maybe I just have not seen anybody implement a dialog that way. In any case this is a higher level problem than just firefox, so it is not useful to complain about here.
Hmm I just realized that the "Change Action" dialog doesn't let you type in the bar. So much for using that as an example. To the GNOME bugzilla...
As a note, you can press CTRL+L or '/' to bring up something you can type into, which includes typeahead.
The drawback of that dialog however is you can only navigate to a path. It throws away the file at the end of your typed path and you are still forced to choose a file manually.