Re: autocompletion

First sorry about my mail from this morning, it was far too aggressive
(I was very tired, that may explain that)

What I remember from the thread (I don't read carefully each email,
especially if they are too long, so I might have missed some very
important points) is that there aren't that many people who really care
about that dropdown, not enough to warrant a pref imo.

I know that it's configurable in mozilla, that's why I talked more about
ie :) But mozilla can still be taken as an example imo: by default there
is a dropdown, and mozilla prefs are so crowded and it takes so long to
find something that I guess most people won't even know it is possible
to change that option. So yeah, we could add an option for it, but there
are lots of other features which could have an option, and we'd end up
with a very crowded pref dialog where people wouldn't be able to find
the things that are really important and that they care about. 

When you say that galeon should be as configurable as possible, I have
to disagree, it should be "reasonably" configurable: when I open a pref
dialog because I want to change an important setting, if I see something
like 10 tabs with lots of checkboxes on them, my initial reaction is
"sigh, how much time will I waste browsing through these tabs to find
this pref :'(", so I'm not really convinced there should be too many
prefs. And the reaction would be probably even worse for people who only
use their computer to browse the web and read their mails.

Wrt to the suggestion from tko, as I understood it it is something like
"if the user type something and never use tab, display the dropdown
after a timeout", if the user uses tab, do..., if the user presses tab
twice, do ..." (I haven't really paid attention to the tab part since I
probably won't use it :)

Once again, sorry for this crappy overaggressive email, I hope I have
read your mail correctly this time, 

Christophe

Le mer 27/11/2002 à 14:46, Philip Langdale a écrit :
> Interesting,
> 
> You clearly didn't carry away the main point of my original e-mail; I
> said I would accept a default that actually worked well for the majority
> of people and that I did not equate that with the current settings. I
> said that I thought the timeout implementation would be best for this.
> 
> As for your assertion that there isn't a sharp divide and that I'm the
> wierd one here, I think it's worth pointing out that no one who has
> got themselves stuck in this thread has actually said that they like
> the auto dropdown. Some have made the argument that we 'need' it for
> newbies who would fret and nash their teeth were it not on, but still
> have reservations about using it themselves; heck, you fall into this
> category.
> 
> I claim that the half and half distribution you assert is not backed
> up by the feedback we've recieived here and is probably closer to the
> other way around.
> 
> And mozilla is a bad example for you to bring up. It has rather nice
> prefs for autocomplete, including a little 'this is what it looks like'
> diagram. I'll happily follow the mozilla model. :-)
> 
> And I really want to get to the bottom of this: Why is it considered
> better to force people to conform to the program instead of allowing the
> program to better optimise itself to their usage habits? And as far as
> I'm concerned, if they have to pull gconf-editor out, we're declaring
> them to be a second class user: "This program doesn't care about you,
> consider yourself grateful we didn't delete that pref completely."
> 
> The last suggestion I read from tko was for having *two* tabs to show
> the dropdown, with no automatic at all. Is that really what you want?
> now I'm confused.
> 
> --phil



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