URLbar Enhancements
URLs just keep getting longer and longer these days. The urlbar should be able to parse them and generate something more... readable by users. I'll throw out a couple ideas:
Page Title URL's
The url of any page is hidden by default and instead, the user is shown the title of the page, and the favicon (perhaps with the url in smaller print to the side). This textbox would not be editable, but when the user hovered over it, it would lite up in a way to indicate it can be clicked. When the user clicks on the URLbar (showing only the title) a textbox appears with the sites url filled in. The user can then type in another URL or another page title, which will be found either through a good autocomplete version, or through a websearch.
OK, I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the above style. There's a lot of questions about why the user should think to click on the page title, why the textbox would show up with a URL the user hasn't seen before, etc. It's all a bit confusing, and there's a lot of options about what to show when and where. But its an idea, and this place is for ideas, eh?
Vista inspired URLbar
I like this idea much better, as its functional. Instead of just showing the URL which might look something like:
URL's are instead parsed for the user, and the box displays things like directories, files, and... all that other junk in a reasonable way. For instance, the above could become something like:
[] http:// > www.google.com > search : q=pants, ie=utf-8, rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official, client=firefox-a
In fact, ideally you could hide all the things that users won't care about and just show:
[] http:// > www.google.com > search : q=pants
Now this can all be shown, not in an editable textbox, but just in a series of xul:labels. Perhaps the passed in parameters like q, wouldn't even be shown, but would just show up when the bar was hovered (in a popup similar to Opera's).
When the user hovers over part of the URL then, it lights up to indicate that it can be clicked, and when its clicked autocomplete does a search of history (and bookmarks) for things matching the url to that point. The actual urlbar becomes a textbox, and the user can refine the autocomplete results by typing. This makes intrasite navigation really really easy.
If the user wants to type a new url, they can doubleclick the urlbar anywhere or single click the http:// section. This would basically provide an empty urlbar to use.
Custom Toolbar Enhancements
Custom toolbars seem really limited in my opinion. Right now they're limited to a simple toolbox with a palette inside it and a few permanent toolbars defined. Users can add custom toolbars to the box, and settings for those toolbars are stored as preferences. Settings for toolbars are system wide so that one toolbar can not be created that with mode=text and another without it.
I know I'm getting greedy with unncessary features, but I'm gonna list the things I'd like to see in toolbars from a customization point of view.
Toolbar Ideas
- Custom toolbars shouldn't be limited to a set at one point in the page.
- You should be able to define toolbars at the top of a web browser and at the bottom and have both be customizable (same for right and left sides).
- Doing this pretty much means removing the toolbox entirely, and so I'd say that applications should be able to just specify a toolbarpalette and toolbars. Toolbars with a customize property=true would be customizable. Toolbars without the property shouldn't be.
- Toolbars don't need names and id's. A user should never have to wonder what the difference is between the Navigation bar and the Bookmarks bar, and how the Main menu bar fits into that picture. Naming toolbars is confusing.
- Non-permanent toolbars need to appear and disappear dynamically based on what the user is doing. If a toolbar is empty it should disappear from the page, but if the user is dragging a new item in an area where no toolbar is currently available but could exist (i.e. close to the edge of a window or another toolbar?), one should appear and be ready to accept the item.
- Toolbars should be customizable on a per-toolbar level.
- I'd say this should be doable through the toolbar's context menu. Right clicking on a toolbar should show you:
- Customize Items... - an option to Customize the toolbar widgets you see
- Toolbar Properties... - an option to bring up Properties for that particular toolbar. This could be both a generic toolbar properties dialog, or a toolbar specific one if the toolbar specified it.
- I'd say this should be doable through the toolbar's context menu. Right clicking on a toolbar should show you:
Toolbar Customize Dialog
- The toolbar customize dialog should morph form dramatically, perhaps into some sort of richlistbox. The box could show both descriptions of toolbar items, along with names and icons. This would also clean up a lot of the code in the current implementation.
Toolbar Palette
- Pretty much every piece of front UI in the application should be a toolbar item, and should be draggable somewhere else if you wanted.
- I'd like to be able to drag elements from the statusbar somewhere else in the browser if I wanted. Or to drag elements from the nav bar to the status bar. This would be possible if the statusbar was part of the toolbox, but using current model, I don't think it is.
- In a slightly more FF centric point. I'd really like to see the tabbar morphed into a toolbar item too. That would allow users to move it easily to wherever they wanted it in their browser, saving them some extra screen space, and would allow things like the taboverflow button, and newtab button to be easily added or removed to the tabbar, without requiring users who don't need them to see them. Hence why I say, I really wish pretty much every piece of front panel UI was a toolbar item.
- Toolbaritems should be able to specify whether they're reusable or not. Items with reusable=true should be able to be placed on the page multiple times if the user wants. This helps move spacers out of the current custom toolbar implmentation, and cleans up the code somewhat. It also allows for some neat widgets like searchboxes to be setup in more useful ways for power users.
- On the same path, you should be able to specify some types of toolbars as toolbars on toolbars. For instance, the URL bar in FF has been picking up more and more icons as time goes by. These icons should be draggable out of the URL bar if the user wants, or other icons should be draggable into the URLbar.
Custom User Toolbars
- I think these are really useless, but in an implementation like this they wouldn't be necessary at all.
- Toolbars should be automatically created when the users drags a palette item near another toolbar, or near the window's edge. (See above.)