Configure Folders Preference Lost/Not-Applied

[Taurean75]

Hey...

Executing ""Sort by Name" on an excluded sub-folder with the recursive option checked/on resets the configuration (checked/included) for that folder.

Thanks!

[eric-bixby]

Not sure why, but I wonder if Firefox is changing the unique id (UUID) when you do this (which is how ASB add-on keeps track). I need to run some tests.

[eric-bixby]

The "configure folder" preference is based on the UUID of the folder. When the UUID of the folder changes, then the preference reverts to the default (of sorting rather than being excluded). Prior to Firefox switching to web-extension API, we were able to store this preference in the "tag" attribute. I need Firefox to bring back "tags", until then we are stuck with this hack. I'm thinking about adding the exclude flag to the folder title; this would work but people might be annoyed by the extra characters in the title.

[eric-bixby]

This may be related to issue #83

[Gitoffthelawn]

Oh, how I would love Firefox to bring back the tags API too! 👍🏾

Changing the folder title could work... you could even append a narrow non-visible character. If you go that route, you'll probably want to add clear info about this hack in a prominent place so people don't mistakenly think something is amiss! :)

[eric-bixby]

@Gitoffthelawn you are right, adding special characters might work, but would most likely confuse and/or annoy users. This would be replacing a hack with another hack.

For everyone else not familiar with the history of the current hack. This issue is related to #54.

Check out this link to a request, by many users, over many years, asking Mozilla to restore/add the "tags" feature to web extensions:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916

The answer is always "no". I think this is a political/economic reason why this will never happen (Google is paying for things and they probably don't care about a Firefox exclusive feature):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

Anyway, I might try the title approach as an experiment, but a potentially more elaborate approach would be to export the Firefox bookmarks, then import that into the add-on. The add-on would then have access to the "tags" attribute.

Of course, the problem with this is that the user would be potentially exporting/importing back and forth. This might be cumbersome.

I'll work on prototypes for both approaches and post them as beta releases.

[eric-bixby]

I've decided to duplicate/steal how ChromeTag does tagging: https://github.com/rotten77/chromtag
The user will add a "#hashtag" to the folder name to indicate exclude-from-sorting or recursive-exclude-from-sort.
The actual tag names still need to be worked out. So the web-UI would add/remove the tag. However, the user will see the tags when looking at the bookmark using the built-in bookmark-manager.