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 caption 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 previous failed attempt, I thought some more about how to implement Status Bar-less controls and came up with the following proposal:
In the above Paint.NET-inspired mock-up I added some more Aero glass to the right-hand side of the toolbar for Sync. This is because Sync is not a tab-specific control. This extra glass gives enough space to implement a Sync control along with any username, without cluttering the area around the window caption buttons; no controls are dangerously close to the close button. I also added a small amount of glass to the left of the Back button to improve symmetry.
Zoom is implemented as a toolbar button that is a hybrid between the Internet Explorer and Opera zoom controls. It's not only intended to be a zoom control, but also a more general View menu like in Opera (more detail about the design of the zoom control below).
Most notably from this mock-up, I've removed the Search Box. This is because I thought it would clutter the toolbar. Now that IE9 has this configuration, it seems to be the direction in which mainstream browsers are following. There are advantages and disadvantages of a Omnibar/One Box style design and I've therefore made a separate article outlining a possible design of a privacy-friendly design of a location bar / search box combo.
Talking of cluttering the toolbar, I think that the current FX4 toolbar button design does not give a minimal noise-free appearance. I therefore wanted to make this consistent with the style of toolbar in Windows Explorer on Windows 7 as follows:
The borders in the new site identity block are also noisy - I therefore wanted to also simplify these as follows:
