213896 - Remove throbber from menu bar (put it back into navigation toolbar or leave it out)

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Pham]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030724 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030724 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

The new idea of throbber is dumb. You did this because of IE.

It's dumb because it makes Firebird more different than Thunderbird(even thouugh
there are bigger differences like icons size and labels).

It's shit when large icons are on which is not problem with old Firebird or
current Thunderbird.

If mac Firebird doesn't have it why make it different for others(The answer is
IE but I don't care)

Throbber has an action and therefore has to be in the toolbar(even though
Mozilla.org's throbbers are the only ones that have actions.

I'm sure I wouldn't want a throbber on menubar on Thunderbird


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firebird
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
see a throbber on menubar

Expected Results:  
throbber on toolbar

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Filing bugs arguing design decsions and calling people dumb is not going to get
you anywhere.  If you want to move the throbber as a personal issue, I'm sure
you know how to customize them by now.  I was not involved in the change, but it
was a design decision and that stands.

Mac doesn't have a menubar, so this change was changed on Mac builds

Comment 2

[Michael Hendy (Hendikins)]

Newsflash: Default behaviour in 0.6 was no throbber at all.

I'll verify anyway though :)

Comment 3

[Pham]

>>I was not involved in the change, but it was a design decision and that stands.

that's only one reason against the many reasons I presented

>>Newsflash: Default behaviour in 0.6 was no throbber at all.

it is in nightlies

>>I'll verify anyway though :)

verifying everything only gets annoying bugmail that's as unneeded as closing a bug

Comment 4

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Taking QA Contact

Comment 5

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

>Filing bugs arguing design decsions and calling people dumb is not going to get
>you anywhere.

Right, this is (unfortunately) the Pham way of doing things. Ignore him as good
as you can.

>If you want to move the throbber as a personal issue, I'm sure you know how to 
>customize them by now.  I was not involved in the change, but it was a design 
>decision and that stands.

Not everything the devs do is a design decision. Sometimes checkins are just a
personal whim and features come and go. Especially the checkin which led to this
smells fishy, since it was Hyatt's  only checkin in the last 3,5 months and came
virtually out of nowhere.

Some points on why this is bad:
1. Consistency
   All the other icons are on the navigation toolbar, the throbber is the only 
   one which is not. This is confusing for the unexperienced user

2. Usability
   In the navigation toolbar a simple right-cklick -> Customize... will let you 
   change the size, position and existence of an icon in the toolbar. You cannot 
   do that with the throbber. Instead you have to customize the navigation 
   toolbar to get at the throbber in the menu toolbar. That's definitely not 
   what I would call good UI design.

3. Height of the menu bar
   The throbber icon increases the size of the menu bar by a few pixels, thereby 
   unnecessarily reducing the visible browsing space.

4. Impossible to have different icons sizes in menu bar and naviagtion toolbar
   At this moment, we always apply the changes in icon size made to the 
   navigation toolbar. I can not have big icons and a small throbber. This will 
   be possible once bug 172517 is fixed.

5. Temporal fix for bug 172530
   Having the throbber to the right of the search bar would also act as a 
   workaround for bug 172530, one of the firebird bugs with the most dupes.

Therefore I'm reopening this.
If you reply, please don't hang on too much on point 5. Point 1-4 is where the
real reasons are.

Comment 6

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Ad comment 2:
I really don't care if we have a throbber in the default configuration or if we
leave it out just like in 0.6. My whole point is that the current behaviour is
as bad as it can be.

Changing summary to reflect this.

Comment 7

[David Hyatt]

The throbber stays where it is.  WONTFIX.

Comment 8

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Ok, if Hyatt says so, it's so.

Comment 9

[Bill Mason]

*** Bug 233875 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Anders Kaseorg]

Alright, assuming that the Firefox throbber is staying in the menubar, and
hopefully that bug 214218 is going to be fixed somehow, are there any plans to
move the Thunderbird throbber to the menubar too?