Alex Faaborg

One thing that I find visually distracting in FF 3 is that on Vista the tooltips mimic the overall tooltip style of the system, except for the rounded corners. Well, they are there, sort of, but a white pixel remains in each corner which looks unpleasant against the drop shadow rendered underneath as well as dark backgrounds.

Tabs on Windows have an ugly underline:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=163087

Looks quite odd compared to other native apps.

Nice, a five-digit bug number, (hopefully) about to be fixed

Oh, forgot one major pet peeve: Installer on Vista and administrative privileges. The issue where you have to explicitly run the installer as administrator to be able to install into %programfiles% (which is probably the most frequent use case). Something akin to Windows Installer’s asking only when needed might be very helpful.

Furthermore FF3 won’t check for updates if it doesn’t have write permissions on its installation directory. So when you’re running as limited user all the time (should be normal on Vista) FF never checks for updates. At least checking won’t require any elevation so why don’t do it? And to install you can still present the UAC dialog.

The 4th polish item above may be nice to have, but it seems a waste of time to work on that while major functionality like Fullscreen mode is still missing on OS X. See:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307371
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370857

- When you select an active download in download manager, there are four ugly white pixels in the progress bar corners.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392672
- not a polish bug precisely, but what about offering a combo stop/reload button along with separate ones, a la Flock.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343396

How about these Alex?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395898
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=406237
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414364
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429525
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430962
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433112

And I have one more but I can’t find the bug link but I’m almost positive there is one. The corners of the progress bar in the download manager are white and looks terrible/unpolished when that download is hightlighted.

Another thing (on Mac OS X 10.5),

the selected section in the Preferences dialog has a line to the left and right. This line looks quite ugly compared to native Leopard applications.

Agh, I guess I was a bit too late with this bug:

Menus should respond to space bar on OS X

It fits perfectly with this week’s theme, and it’s (hopefully) easy to solve.

A few more:
- consistency for search boxes: add-ons, applications and download manager search boxes say Search… inside the text box with no label. History and Bookmarks manager, cookie manager, password manager all have a label in front of the search box. This should be easier to do now with the search widget available.
- the search (filter) box in about:config is too wide making the cancel button (blue X) almost undiscoverable in all but the oddest screen widths Also, I can’t find any other place where “filter” is used besides there. This would also, hopefully, make room for , , , buttons in the future.
- a new throbber in the main toolbar and tabs would be an easy, most likely innocuous update. Not that it needs to be a piece of art but the current looks just dull.

Now that I got warmed up,

the progress bar in Firefox is way too small and not so visible. Safari has a nice solution to this. There is a Firefox extension called Fission which simulates this.

Would be nice to have this functionality as default.

One more, somewhat related:

Context menus should respond to cmd/opt-arrow in Mac OS

Again, the behavior seems to be already implemented; it’s (apparently) just a matter of wiring the correct key shortcuts to it.

Re the menu hiding on Vista:
The hidden state is toggled using a context menu or preference in Vista applications. The Alt key gives focus to the menu bar, showing it if hidden. When an item is selected, the menu loses focus, or the Alt key is pressed while the menu still has focus, the menu disappears.

I’m going to have to push for this one:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392644
Control animations on Vista would be awesome! You’d even be the first browser to do it! (Even IE doesn’t for some reason)

One really minor thing I’d like fixed is having Combobuttons on Vista the same height as Buttons. (They’re a few pixels too high for some reason)

Another annoying polish bug: whenever the notification bar appears, it pushes the content area down. This is both annoying and disorienting. Safari cleverly pushes the content area up as the notification bar comes down, so that the content never appears to move at all. This is what should happen whenever a new toolbar suddenly appears (except, I suppose, when you actually want to startle the user). [Bug 248715] Implementing this capability would allow other useful features, such as finally moving the find bar to the (more logical) top without being annoying. [Bug 254687] It would also allow two notification bars to appear one below the other unobtrusively (currently, the newer one simply overlaps the older one). [Bug 395307]

The star and rss icons are not vertically centered, but they almost touch the top and right border on linux:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455524

José Jeria: The tabs in Safari’s preferences dialog box look similar (vertical lines on either side of the icons). I am using the latest WebKit nightly. I kind of like it.

I’m a bit unsure if those two fit here, but I’ll mention them anyway

First is Bug 63107 (On mouseover of submit button, show URL in status bar) which is at least nice.

Second is Bug 83749 (Accept property for input type=”file” should filter file types) which wouold be useful for accessibility.

Here’s one for OSX that could use a little TLC: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457491 — Buttons on the bookmark toolbar look bad (rounded edge off by 1 pixel) when tall items [like the quick search bar] are placed in the toolbar.

I’m really happy about #4 getting done. I don’t know if separate implementation is required to also apply the change to the toolbar customize box, but that needs to be done as well.

It’s also bothered me that the toolbar customize box doesn’t animate in on OS X (like every other box like it in other apps). I know it’s a XUL box, so it’s not straightforward, but it would be a nice consideration.

Along that same though, the “Save Page As…”, and “Print…” boxes should be the same type of box as the toolbar customize on Leopard.

Here’s a polish bug for you:

On Leopard, if you change the contents of the location bar, then use Cmd+z to undo the changes, the state of the bar doesn’t return to a loaded page. Specifically, the go button sticks around and the site button is the one for a blank page. To reproduce:

1. Load any web page. (Only tried in Leopard)
2. Modify location bar contents.
3. Hold Cmd and press ‘z’.

Expected results: Site button for the currently displayed page should return, along with the bookmark icon and RSS icon (if there are feeds on the page). And the go button should go away.

It works as expected if you use Esc instead of Cmd+z.