Firefox/Projects/New Theme

Overview

Sprint lead: shorlander
Sprinters: faaborg, limi, (martell)
Timeframe: 2 weeks (beginning 2009/07/13)

Description: Exploring a revamp of the Windows theme in evolutionary phases. Identifying current issues and weaknesses. Focus on modernizing and streamlining.

Current Theme Issues

Now has its own page: 3.0 Windows Default Theme Issues

Visually Appealing Windows Applications

This is sometimes a hard area to explore. Windows applications are not known for their visual design savvy. There are however a few applications that rather nicely designed (visually if not functionally).

• Paint (Windows 7): A shocking selection perhaps. Relative merits of the Ribbon UI aside, Paint for Windows 7 does look good visually. There are few stand out elements:
  • Tabs - Simple, smooth and they flow into the rest of the Ribbon.
  • Smooth Gradient - There is a nice smooth unifying gradient from the top of the tab to the bottom of the Ribbon UI.
  • Small Icons on Buttons - The smaller icons for "Tools" are nicely positioned in buttons that have a tactile feel.

• Postbox: Even though Postbox elected to keep the Menu Bar, it minimized the visual impact of the menu bar by having the line separator fade out. Also notable is that as a cross platform application it fits in with the native look and feel of both OS X and Windows.

• Zune Player: The word "Zune" doesn't really evoke feelings of good design (industrial or visual). Yet the Zune Player application is quite attractive. Decidedly not native. It has a minimalist and streamlined look that fades into the background. The buttons look physical and pressable, but still soft. It has a simple back arrow, clear song controls and even a very nice subtle touch of a red glow on the bottom of the screen that gently pulses to the music.

Goals

General

• Streamline UI Elements
• Reduce Visual Footprint
• Modernize Look and Feel
• Retain Visual Integration While Still Being Attractive

Design

New theme implementation should be accomplished in two phases.

Mockups

• 4.0 Mockups: Firefox/4.0 Windows Theme Mockups
• 3.7 Mockups: Firefox/3.7 Windows Theme Mockups

Short-Term (Firefox 3.7):

(Updated)

Lightweight changes. Mostly style and texture. Some element shift/removal.

• Make use of Aero Glass
• Combine Stop and Reload (Separate Stop and Reload buttons in Customization dialog)
• Hiding of MenuBar
• Sort and Trim Menu Items
• Make use of Page and Tools buttons
• Move "Home" button to Home Tab
• Changes to the TabBar to make it more streamlined
• Shift towards more unified look across Windows variations(while still retaining platform look & feel "spirit")
  • Less "bright and colorful" icons
  • More tangible button appearance
  • Perhaps more glyphs
• General icon cleanup/polish

Long-Term (Firefox 4.0):

(Updated) Major changes. New UI elements, removal and/or relocation of traditional elements.

• Combine Reload/Stop/Go
• Move Reload/Stop/Go to the LocationBar
• Remove StatusBar
• Relocate StatusBar Content
• Combine Location and Search
• Addition of thin progress bar (tied to LocationBar in active tab and top of tab for background tabs)
• Possibly move tabs on top, above main toolbar. (option to move back underneath navigation bar and possibly left or right as well)
• Remove the bookmarks bar(if never user altered)
• Addition of tab sidebar
• Even less system native styling
• Download notification overlay UI

Platform Capabilities

These are all things that we would need to be able to do to create the theme changes that have been mocked up.  As new limitations emerge I'll add them to this list as well.

All Platforms: General

• bug 513157 Ability to draw the title bar ourselves (possibly tabs, weave, OS theme integration, personas)
  • bug 513158 Josh will look into this more for OS X
  • bug 513162 Windows: talk to Jim or rstrong
  • bug 513159 Linux: only gnome for overlaying the title bar? perhaps consider dropping, need to talk to karl tomlinson, zwol

• Additional OS theme resource extraction (are there things we should expose to the platform from the new OS themes?)
  • Nothing comes to mind right now on things that are available

• Full OS theme detection (reduce our reliance on extraction)
  • Not a problem, just need to actually do it

• Icons: all icons are in toolkit, about:icons, icon protocol
  • Every agrees we should do it, just need to get it done

• Colors: about:colors, single file with all hard coded colors, new primitives (moz-red)
  • Dao got started on doing this, it's a build time thing

All Platforms: Customization

• Ability to have multiple instances of the same control in the customization palette
  • Not a problem, just need to actually do it

• Ability to change the appearance of a control based on its location relative to other controls on the toolbar
  • Possible, but a lot easier to just do it based off of the immediate right and left items. We can go farther than that but it starts to get intractably complex.

Windows

• Ability to package multiple themes (XP, Vista, 7) instead of relying on chrome overrides
  • Showing both in the theme manager might be difficult, need to follow up on the

• Ability to package different .ico files for different versions of Windows
  • First icon embedded in the firefox.exe, so we would have to have different exe files.
  • However, we can control the icon used for shortcuts (start menu, quick launch, desktop) so that very well could be good enough, especially if we are drawing our own title bar so can use whatever

• bug 506124 Glass support (already well discussed and on track, but a platform capability nonetheless)
  • Some interesting cases with personas bug 513170 and also private browsing bug 513418