User:Broccauley/Visible Zoom and Sync Status Without the Status Bar

Mozilla's decision to remove the status bar at all costs was annoying me. It wasn't annoying me because I have any particular love for the Status Bar; rather it was because the potential functionality of items that naturally belong on the Status Bar was being removed without proposals for suitable functional alternatives.

In particular, sync and zoom - these are not only controls, but they are useful status indicators as well. A status indicator is not functional if it is buried in a menu! I'm all for minimal interfaces, just not ones which have been dumbed-down in the name of minimalism alone.

Current proposals for zoom are to place it as a slider in the buried menu. I discussed in detail why this is not a good idea in my previous attempt to design a zoom control - mainly the current zoom status is not easily visible to the user, and that it makes the menu design cluttered.

Current proposals for Sync combine a temporary sync status with the window control buttons - this doesn't really make sense as Sync has nothing to do with changing the state of the window, nor will this effectively show the Sync status. There are also proposals to clutter up the Firefox button with the user-name - this is ugly, clutters the interface, reduces space for tabs, and takes away the potential of a syntactically logical menu design.

Following my [[[User:Broccauley/The_Firefox_Zoom_Neglect#Factoring-in Mozilla's desire to remove the Status Bar|previous failed attempt]], I thought some more about how to implement Status Bar-less controls and came up with the following proposal: