In an effort to increase the level of Firefox’s visual and interactive polish, I’ll be posting a list of around 7 bugs every monday from now until we finish up Firefox 3.1. These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3′s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect.
Here are the seven polish problems for this week. These were mostly selected at random from a larger group of polish bugs, and are presented in no particular order:
1. Star icon should fill in on downclick on OS X (bug 431444) and Linux (bug 431458)
2. Style system tray notifications on Vista (bug 426712), XP (bug 426713), and Linux (bug 426714)
3. Polish the Launch Application window (bug 445639)
4. Remove favicon from “Getting Started” (bug 426976)
5. Set background color of sidebars on Vista to match media collection apps (bug 425999)
6. Don’t change Bookmark Contextual dialog width when clicking Folder/tags expander (bug 421701)
7. Icons in the Applications Prefpane (bug 429725)
If you have any spare cycles and are interested in working on these, by all means dive in. Also, if there are any polish issues that personally drive you nuts, make sure they are filed and mention them in the comments so we can get them queued up for a future week of polish bugs.
Whenever I read about “Polish”, something rings in my head. Can’t stop it :)
So, this post made the bell ring a lot!
Bookmark icons in the Bookmarks menus need to be moved down 1 pixel and right 1 pixel (text may need to be nudged right 1 pixel as well).
The Navigation & Bookmarks toolbars could use some padding at the bottom. There seems to be 1 pixel padding/margin above the Home button and none below… same with the bookmark bar buttons. Using my Windows Visual Style (Luna Element 3) the back button is almost hanging off the toolbar.
The bookmarks bar buttons could use better padding (i.e. same amount of padding top, bottom, left & right around icon and text).
I’d like to see all these improved, but the bookmark icons being misaligned is the biggest annoyance for me.
Just eyeballing these – Windows XP, Firefox 3.0.1, new profile.
Any chance of getting:
- cool tab move animation a la Chrome
- Firefox to honor “Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key (Control Panel/Display/Appearance/Effect on XP). This would help a cleaner look.
- more space between bookmarks icons and labels in bookmarks menu (at least as much
?
It’s been posted on bugzilla and ignored a thousand thousand times but THE TAB CLOSE BUTTON SHOULD BE ON THE RIGHT FOR OS X!!!!!
These three drive me nuts.
Missing drop indication for live titles: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430446
Size issues with live titles properties sheet on OS X: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426709
ctrl/cmd + click on bookmarks toolbar folder should not open folder: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430577
OS X:
The toolbar is pregnant.
IT BEARS REPEATING THAT THE TAB CLOSE BUTTON SHOULD BE ON THE RIGHT.
The keyhole looks like a slider, and it makes the whole toolbar taller for the sake of one button—why not make EVERY BUTTON bigger? It’d conform better to Fitts’s Law. (Actually, the keyhole is a problem on all platforms except Linux…)
The bookmarks bar pops out (it has a white gradient).
The toolbar buttons are rounded—they should be square.
There are two shades of inactive glyphs when the window is deselected—there should be only one. Otherwise the darker shade looks clickable, and the whole thing looks ugly.
The icon lacks 256*256 and 512*512 sizes.
Contextual menus don’t have rounded corners. (They also don’t blur the background, but that’s less important.)
When you hover a background tab, the favicon and text become more opaque. This looks silly, and as feedback, it’s insufficiently visible and unintuitive (it implies that only the icon and the text are clickable, as opposed to the tab surrounding them). Just darken or lighten the whole tab.
The toolbar is too tall, even if Use Small Icons is checked.
The toolbar buttons are too low—they should be Safari’s height, not Finder’s, to compensate for the bookmark and tab bars.
Every time I launch Firefox on a guest account on Leopard, the Dock icon fades in and out a few times, I’m asked to import my bookmarks, it welcomes me to Firefox 3 (encouraging me to close this tab), and bothers me about default browsers. Can I just get to browsing?
Command-clicking bookmarks from the menubar opens them in the same tab.
That’s all I can think of for now! Thanks for listening to our com(ments/plaints).
The Go button doesn’t react noticably on hover. This makes it difficult to click on it reliably. (Bug 352746)
Firefox is schizophrenic about whether blank pages should have a favicon or not. Open a new blank tab: no favicon at all. Now, click on the identity button, or change tabs and return: the identity button suddenly has a blank page favicon, while the tab continues not to have any. Open a new window: both the identity button and the tab have a blank page favicon. Bookark a blank page: blank page favicon displayed for the bookmark. Shouldn’t all this be consistent?
The Go button appears for blank pages, even when the location bar has not been modified. Why? After all, it’s totally useless.
Previous versions of Firefox allowed one to select the entire contents of the location bar by clicking on its favicon. This is extremely useful if you prefer to have
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAlltofalse, such as for those who know how to modify URLs, and do so. With Firefox 3, however, the identity information is brought up. Luckily, clicking on the identity button again hides the identity information and also selects the contents of the location bar. When I discovered this, I thought: ‘Great! I’ll just double-click from now on.’ —Except that it doesn’t work. While the site identity information is being brought up, a second click does absolutely nothing. This introduces an unusable delay to selecting the entire location bar contents…enough that I’ve had to accept the lesser of the two evils and setbrowser.urlbar.clickSelectsAlltotrue. In short, double-clicking on the site identity button should behave like single clicking on the Firefox ≤2 location bar favicon.There’s been a lot of work done towards merging Stop and Reload in a usable manner, but I haven’t seen any activity on bug 343396 at all lately. Any chance of this getting into Firefox 3.1?
You’ve previously discussed merging the location and search bars. I think we all know that this would be ideal. Google Chrome did it. It looks like Fennec will do something similar. IE8 hasn’t done it, but its search bar does have some nice ideas that would be useful for a merged awesomebar. I know there are a lot of questions to be answered in order to do this right. Have you given any further thought towards finally doing this for Firefox 3.1? A blog post discussing the idea would be great, and could prove useful in figuring out how to do this well.
Speaking of Google Chrome, one cool thing about the interface is that the title and tab bars are effectively merged. After all, the title bar is redundant. Its main use is moving the window, which is very rarely done. This is probably too complex to do for Firefox 3.1, but it would certainly be nice—and would save quite a bit of valuable vertical screen real estate—if the two bars were eventually merged (in a native-theme–respecting manner, of course).
Any progress on a GTK+ version of the keyhole? Frankly, I would be happy if there were any way to have it. I don’t care if it’s an about:config setting, some lines of CSS, an experimental extension…anything. As long as there’s some possible way to have a keyhole, I’ll be happy. The GTK+ version of Firefox looks more like a 2.9 than a 3.0.
Speaking of the keyhole, contrary to Superdotman’s impression, the other buttons actually are taller. The clickable area has been extended vertically, to make use of the extra space, but the icons haven’t increased in size. This is mostly fine with me. However, unlike the other buttons, the location bar is not any taller. There is unused vertical space. Making the location bar in large-icon mode taller would not just be good because of Fitts’ Law, but it would increase the legibility of text therein. You would also be able to increase the size of the “lucky charms” to the same size as the rest of the toolbar button icons. Finally, you could show a larger favicon, making use of the 32px²-sized favicons some site are providing (such as Google Reader). By the way, Google Chrome also made the location bar text larger.
I know it’s been requested oh-so-many times before, but Firefox still lacks a discoverable way to create new tabs. It already has a good way of doing so: double-click the tab bar. This is, in my opinion, more efficient than IE7’s buttton, which is a moving target. But it’s not discoverable. The ‘double-’ part is also unnecessary. A single click should be enough to create a new tab, as single-clicking currently does nothing. So, my proposal is to combine the two behaviours: show a new tab, a la IE7, spanning the entire tab bar, whenever one hovers over the bar. At the very least, for Firefox 3.1, change double-click to a single click.
What’s the purpose of the separate throbber toolbar button (in the upper-right corner)? Honestly, I don’t see what use it has, and I have had it removed from Firefox for years. There are other activity indicators, and the keyhole is now Firefox’s brand identity. So, why not just kill that throbber already?
I’m sure I have more nitpicks, but that’s all I can remember at the moment. Thanks.
N.B. Tt seems my
olandlitags were stripped out. That’s why my comment looks so disorganized. Apologies to anyone reading it.This is another small polish issue on linux:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455524
- places: when searching, highlight selected result’s folder – at least allow opening containing folder in contextual menu (so that you can better organize bookmarks)
- contextual menu for awesome bar suggestion (eg. copy link location without visiting site)
Superdotman: The pregnant toolbar should be fixed in the new nightly.
David, re toolbar button size:
Yeah, I figured that out after messing with it. But really, buttons’ visual appearance should correspond to their clickable areas. It’s common sense.
Violating common sense means that the areas right above and below a button are clickable, but not to the left and to the right.
Violating common sense means that some toolbar whitespace affects nothing, some activates a button, and some moves the window. A connected expanse of grey should not have three different behaviors!
Plus the extra clickable area is only useful to people who don’t look where they’re clicking to begin with. Those who do look will (and do) click on the visible area.
Markus Stange:
Awesome! It looks so much better now.
OS X:
The default downloads folder should be the default Downloads folder.
The whole toolbar should be draggable, not just the title bar.
When Mr. Lizard and I said RIGHT, we meant LEFT. ´•_•`
Why does the text in a tab get blue-outlined when you click on it? The outline doesn’t seem to represent anything.
Three cheers for the Firefox team! yay yay yay
Superdotman: I don’t disagree. The size of a toolbar button should be apparent before hovering over it. I was just saying that having unused space, especially above and below the location bar, bothered me more. Also, since I don’t use the OS X version of Firefox, that unused space will always do nothing.
OS X:
First of all, please see the picture of the following links.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/apple.macintosh.farm/SNZK0ZWNU6I/AAAAAAAAAPk/qa1fUlgMUXc/s800/Fx3r.png
There are two improvement requests.
1)I think that the Close button of tab has the good left.
2)You should make brighter the background color of tab which is not chosen. This is because the color of TEXT is also black, so it is very hard to see.
Please do your best for a good user interface. It is aiding.
____________________
Hardware ; Macintosh [ MacBook Pro(Mid2007) ]
OS ; Mac OSX(10.4.11 or 10.5.4)
Firefox ; v3.0.1 (ja-JP-Mac)
Thunderbird ; v2.0.0.16
Is it possible to have someone look at this bug (444346)?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444436
I said, in the bug report:
The installer window for a Mac (on Firefox 3) could be done in a clearer
manner. Right now, when you open the disk image, you’re presented with a
picture of a Firefox icon and an arrow indicating that it should be dragged to
the Applications folder. This could be clearer, particularly by including
explanatory text.
The bookmarks system doesn’t work properly, consuming too much CPU time:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434845
Hi!
Will it be possible in the near future to customize the button-colors under Vista? Why I have to use blue buttons on Vista, even though I hate blue? I would like to use it in the xp-colours, too!!!
This:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367993
There’s even a working extension for it.
And I dislike the default toolbar configuration a lot, such a tremendous waste of vertical space. I think the default themes of all other browsers are much better at this than Fx, specially now with “always show the tab bar” active by default.
I know I’m not alone in this since I see a lot of screenshots from people who tried to delete all the default bookmarks (it appears that “most visited” can’t be deleted, not that I’ve tried) but didn’t figure out how to turn off the bookmarks bar.