Talk:Firefox/Projects/New Theme

What are the [Stephen] and [Page] controls? Conserve width for Location field and awesomebar text

Hey, I don't know if you're monitoring this page for feedback, but...

The changes in general look promising.

• In "Firefox 4.0", what is the [Stephen] gadget next to Minimize-Maximize-Close? Is it the "Download notification overlay UI" gadget?
• What's the [Page] button for?

I'm concerned that adding [Page] and [Tools] takes space away from the Location field. In Firefox 3.6apre1 URLs such as this wiki page already get truncated, with these changes even more of the end will be invisible. On old-school sites the end of a URL is a string of meaningless query parameters, but on good RESTful sites it's the important part of the URL, often including a meaningful position in the fragment identifier, and I want to see it! Furthermore, in current awesomebar implementation the drop-down's width is constrained by the Location field, so reducing its width makes the awesomebar less usable. Maybe if there's an "icon only" option for Page and Tools, or maybe they should default to icon-only — nothing else on this row in the UI has text except for the two input fields.-- Skierpage 21:19, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

A couple pointers

First, people will hate you for moving the tabs on top. I don't care, but keep in mind what happened to Safari 4. Is system native always bad? It can often be quite good :). Why do we have the search bar at all? We already have search in the awesome bar, so just take it out, save a lot of space that way, and people can always put it back in if they want.

Why get rid of the menu bar?

It's the bookmarks toolbar I always dump, first thing. I use the menu bar all the time. Though it's a good idea to reduce the vertical space occupied at the top.

(I do it by using a compact layout (LittleFox), moving onto the same line as the menubar: the navigation buttons, the awesome bar (which IS awesome) and the search bar. Tabs run on a line below that, although with the wider screens, I may take another look at putting them in a side bar. Tabs in the sidebar is a much better place for keeping them hierarchically organized, the way some of the new tab designs do in the competition.)

My preferences aren't the same as anyone else's, and that's the real take-home message: Yes, you want a consistent and gorgeous look. But other than that you just want to be sure placement is very easily and obviously customizable. We've all got our own ways of doing things. That's probably why we're using Firefox. --Quixote 19:15, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Progress on tabs instead?

I noticed the addition of a progressbar under the awesomebar in the 4.0 mockup. Wouldn't it be much better to have progress show on the tabs them selves, that way if i open a lot of tabs at once i can instantly see what tabs are loading and how far along they are. I use tabmixplus for this currently and find it to be a really useful feature.

The progressbar could be a thin one like suggested with the current mockup, or it could be the tab filling with color like the new taskbar in win7 (this way it keeps with the system scheme.)

Just a thought.