Feedback on Perfect Home

[Gitoffthelawn]

Hi! Thank you for creating Perfect Home. I gave it a try, and since you spent your time creating it, I thought I would offer some feedback. All of this is intended to be constructive feedback!

Overall, I feel like you did a great job on it. There is much I like about it, but I'm not using it for now because of the reasons below.

Things I really like:
A) Minimal permissions
B) Clean UI
C) Nice use of color
D) Somewhat customizable (would like more in that area)

Things I don't really like:

1. The search finds individual letters, so searching for "hd" will find "Hello World". That doesn't match how I want search to work. Search is also very slow when you have many bookmarks.
2. The extension is very large. I haven't gone through all the source code to see why.
3. With many bookmarks, it is slow to load.
4. I could only fit 3 docked folders on a wide screen.
5. The actual URL of a bookmark is secondary to me. The description is primary. This extension makes the URL the primary focus. Perhaps add an option to switch them around.

Suggestions:
a) Overall, I like the docked folder UI more than the non-docked folder UI. I think it would be great to have everything work liked the docked folders.
b) Perhaps add an optional clock (without seconds!).
c) Perhaps make favicon display an option in both the individual items and for search.

Question:
Where are you pulling favicons from?

[tborychowski]

Thanks for the feedback!
Because there are no tracking, stats or any kind of analytics on how people are using it, I really appreciate any feedback :-)

Let me try to address/answer some of your issues/questions:

1. This is called fuzzy search. It's not perfect and may not be to everyone's liking, but once you get the hang of it - it is great. That said - I think your point hints that it could be improved and I think I know what you mean; the results that match the query more closely should be promoted.
   That is something I can do. Can you please open another issue and describe in more details what issues you have with search and what you'd like to see?

2. I did add some libraries recently and TBH, haven't checked the size-wise. I will do that (check the size of libs/extension #87).

3. That's a nice find. I know my testing is not that great ;-) I will check that better (loading large numbers of bookmarks is slow #88).

4. Docked folder width depends on the longest bookmark name. You can rename a bookmark to something shorter. You can also tweak the css so the width of docked folders is always e.g. 100px.

5. I hope you mean bookmark name, not the actual description as these may be very long!
   Anyway, my thinking here was: name is under the thumbnail, so the missing bit (that would help identify it) is the url. Moreover, if you have name under the thumb, why would you need that repeated in the thumb itself? But I do see your point. I'll think about that.

a. I'm afraid that this is where we disagree :-) The only reason I've created this extension is because I come from Opera (very long time ago) than safari (long time ago) and then vivaldi (just before firefox). All these browsers have something similar to this and I created this addon, exactly for the reason that I needed to have a bookmark-based speed-dial type of thing. So this is not going away.
That said, nothing stops you from setting an empty folder as main folder and then adding as many docked folders as you can fit :-)

b. That one is also something I don't understand the need for. I've seen many extensions that just show a nice picture and a clock. Why?
You already have a clock in your OS (couple pixels to the right and to the top/bottom). You also have a clock on your phone and maybe on your wrist. Why do you need to see that in a new tab also? :-)
The whole role of the new tab is to give you a list of links to click, not to meditate on the passage of time :-)

c. Not sure what you mean here. Favicons are displayed in search box, and in docked folders.
Unfortunately they're too small to show as thumbnails.

Where are you pulling favicons from?

From here:

perfect-home/src/lib/utils.js

Line 129 in 57bc3cb

const favIconService = 'https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=';

I tried so many free and paid services and even tried creating my own (in another extension of mine) but failed to find something that's reliable, free (I don't want to pay for other people's bookmarks) and will always be there.
And there is no easy way to create something that would work from within the extension (CORS issues). And page icons is one of the trickiest thing to do correctly.

[Gitoffthelawn]

You're welcome! I'll get back to you with responses. If you don't hear back from me, just ping me here.

We can talk more about favicons later (and I can point you to some quality code for them), but in the meantime, since you're using Google, I would definitely recommend making favicons optional.

[tborychowski]

Hi @Gitoffthelawn,
So I've done some performance test with large numbers of bookmarks (20 folders, 600-700 bookmarks per folder) and it's reasonably fast.
I tried adding more bookmarks, but firefox built-in bookmark manager was freezing.
How many bookmarks is "many" for you, so you get the performance issues?

[Gitoffthelawn]

Hi @tborychowski,

Thanks for looking in to it!

I consider 10K bookmarks to be "many", although I've heard of people having 60K, and even 80K.

Personally, I don't think I will exceed 50K before I choose to delete large swaths of them. In other words, I consider 50K to be the upper reasonable limit for myself.

I've never heard of Firefox's built-in bookmark manager balking even with huge (over 50K) bookmark lists. The exceptions I've experienced are importing and (possibly) exporting. Even at 10K, you think Firefox's bookmark system is frozen, but it's just working slowly in the background. I've had to wait 20+ minutes for it to finish. Did you experience something else?

[tborychowski]

wow, that's much more than I expected ;-)
I need to retest that with more bookmarks

[tborychowski]

@Gitoffthelawn
I still haven't gone around to do the performance testing 😞

However, one good news is that in the latest version of the extension you can disable any 3rd party requests (it's actually OFF by default, so you'd have to consciously enable it).
See more info here.
😄