580970 - Tabs on top with Ubuntu Radiance and Ambiance looks less unified than it could

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Attachment: Actual results

Steps to reproduce:
 1) Use Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
 2) Make sure either Ambiance or Radiance is selected as the Gnome theme.
 3) Run a Firefox nightly from around 2010-07-21.
 4) Enable tabs on top.

Actual results:
The background color of the tab bar is the toolbar background color. This looks jarring in general, but it's particularly displeasing that there's a narrow space above inactive tabs that's of different color than the menu bar.

Expected results:
Expected the background of the tab bar to use the background color of the menu bar.

Comment 1

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Attachment: Mockup of expected results

Comment 2

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Attachment: New actual results

The new tab design that leaves a bit of space between the tabs the makes this more conspicuous.

Comment 3

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Nominating as a blocker since this is a UI polish issue with the Ubuntu default theme and a color variation of the default theme.

Comment 4

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

FWIW, it's actually more than a background color. For example, try setting the Murrine-Sky type of controls, the menu bar actually has a background pattern...

Comment 5

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

A quick search for Maverick screen shots suggests that the default theme on Maverick would have this same problem.

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Looks like third-party theme developers agree with the expectation of the menu bar / title bar color extending to the tab bar background with tabs on top:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-ambiance-radiance-themes-for-chrome-firefox-opera/

Comment 7

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

On the other hand, AFAIK, the other GNOME applications don't unify the tab bar background and the menu bar background colors.

Comment 8

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> On the other hand, AFAIK, the other GNOME applications don't unify the tab bar
> background and the menu bar background colors.

The main problem here is that what Ubuntu does is relying on engine hacks and making a lot of assumptions about the applications. None of the official GNOME themes does anything similar because the current GTK theming system was not designed to allow this.

Comment 9

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Can someone from Ubuntu please respond to comment 8 and help us understand what we should do here? We're in the dark, really.

Comment 10

[Chris Coulson]

This isn't something that I feel comfortable answering - I'll try and find somebody who works on the theme to respond to comment 8.

Comment 11

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > On the other hand, AFAIK, the other GNOME applications don't unify the tab bar
> > background and the menu bar background colors.
> 
> The main problem here is that what Ubuntu does is relying on engine hacks and
> making a lot of assumptions about the applications. None of the official GNOME
> themes does anything similar because the current GTK theming system was not
> designed to allow this.

Is there a technical problem that prevents using the same background for both the menubar and the tab bar backgrounds in Firefox when tabs are on top? I don't see other Gnome apps putting tabs on top, so I think it's not useful to generalize from other Gnome apps. I think it's aesthetically obvious that the menu bar background should extend to the tab background when tabs are on top.

Comment 12

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to comment #11)
> Is there a technical problem that prevents using the same background for both
> the menubar and the tab bar backgrounds in Firefox when tabs are on top? I
> don't see other Gnome apps putting tabs on top, so I think it's not useful to
> generalize from other Gnome apps. I think it's aesthetically obvious that the
> menu bar background should extend to the tab background when tabs are on top.

For one, the engine Ubuntu uses also has modes where it displays patterns in the menubar background. These would be very hard to get in the tabbar background without actually hacking the engine itself.

Then, there are plenty of GNOME and Gtk+ applications that don't have a toolbar, and as such can end up with a tabbar right below the menubar. See gnome-terminal, for example. Though gnome-terminal expands the tabs horizontally, so the lack of tabbar background is less obvious, it still is there (background tabs are lower than the front tab, exposing a bit of background color)

Comment 13

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Anyways, I think this should be handled by the engine, not by firefox.

Comment 14

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

This will hopefully be easier in the future (GTK3) for which the theming system rewrite is still in early stages. Maybe Canonical could step up and help there?

Comment 15

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> See gnome-terminal, for example.

Whoa. I hadn't used Gnome Terminal with tabs. Yeah, Gnome Terminal with tabs on top is ugly, too.

> Anyways, I think this should be handled by the engine, not by firefox.

Given that as of this month Firefox no longer uses the tab design from the Gnome/Gtk theme engine but uses its app-specific (better-looking IMO) tab design, it seems weird for the tab bar background to be ugly for consistency with apps that do use the tab design from the Gnome/Gtk theme.

Comment 16

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to comment #15)
> Given that as of this month Firefox no longer uses the tab design from the
> Gnome/Gtk theme engine but uses its app-specific (better-looking IMO) tab
> design, it seems weird for the tab bar background to be ugly for consistency
> with apps that do use the tab design from the Gnome/Gtk theme.

That's a matter of taste. I prefer consistency. Design improvements should go where they belong: in Gtk themes.

But anyways, to give you a better taste of what I meant in comment 4 see the screenshot I'm going to attach. Good luck expanding that in Firefox's tabbar background. FYI, this is the same theme engine as Ubuntu's theme, only using a different gtkrc (and this look can probably be found in gnome-appearance-properties)

Comment 17

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Attachment: Murrine theme engine variant

Comment 18

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

(In reply to comment #16)
> (In reply to comment #15)
> > Given that as of this month Firefox no longer uses the tab design from the
> > Gnome/Gtk theme engine but uses its app-specific (better-looking IMO) tab
> > design, it seems weird for the tab bar background to be ugly for consistency
> > with apps that do use the tab design from the Gnome/Gtk theme.
> 
> That's a matter of taste. I prefer consistency. Design improvements should go
> where they belong: in Gtk themes.

I think this argument would be more persuasive if Firefox 4 wasn't breaking away from Gtk themes for the appearance of the tabs themselves.

Also, there are two problems with not polishing the appearance ahead of Gtk themes:
 1) Firefox doesn't look distinctive compared other browsers that support Gtk theming e.g. Midori.
 2) Firefox doesn't look distinctive compared to its own old versions. This in particular makes it look like Firefox for Linux had not been getting development attention when the Windows and Mac version have distinctive UI polish. This makes new versions of Firefox look less exciting on Linux.

Note that an app can look distinctive and still feel right for the platform. Firefox itself on Windows and Mac is evidence of this. Of course, with Mac and Windows there are fewer OS themes to integrate with.

> But anyways, to give you a better taste of what I meant in comment 4 see the
> screenshot I'm going to attach. Good luck expanding that in Firefox's tabbar
> background.

I think it's more important to look polished on themes that ship with Ubuntu by default (especially the default theme and its shipped-by-default color variant) than to do something that works with every possible theme. What's shipped by default on Ubuntu is what most users see.

I don't know how feasible special-casing Ambiance and Radiance is technically. In particular, I don't know if Firefox has the infrastructure for choosing a different Gtk background for a given bar depending on what the Gtk theme is.

Comment 19

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #18)
> I think it's more important to look polished on themes that ship with Ubuntu by
> default (especially the default theme and its shipped-by-default color variant)
> than to do something that works with every possible theme. What's shipped by
> default on Ubuntu is what most users see.

It may be important, but we're not going to do it at the cost of breaking other themes. Anyway, Canonical distributes Firefox for Ubuntu, so it seems they are in a better position to make modifications targeted at their themes.

Comment 20

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

So, based on previous comments, looks like we can't/won't be blocking Firefox 4 on this.

Comment 21

[Andrea Cimitan]

(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > On the other hand, AFAIK, the other GNOME applications don't unify the tab bar
> > background and the menu bar background colors.
> 
> The main problem here is that what Ubuntu does is relying on engine hacks and
> making a lot of assumptions about the applications. None of the official GNOME
> themes does anything similar because the current GTK theming system was not
> designed to allow this.

Ciao mmonreal :)
This is false.
I am the maintainer of gtk-engines and author of Clearlooks' themes for GNOME. There are no hacks in murrine neither in the light-themes.

The only thing which is different from "usual theming" is the dark menubar, which is a design decision and it isn't absolutely a hack.

Comment 22

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

How should one interpret this bug being marked as blocking2.0- while https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4.0_Linux_Theme_Mockups#Firefox_Button_.28Ambiance.29 shows up on the design wiki? Is the mockup (https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/thumb/5/5b/Firefox-button_linux_mockup.png/874px-Firefox-button_linux_mockup.png) on the wiki part of the plan for 4.0?

Comment 23

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

This seems to work ok with the stock ubuntu themes. I also tried Murrine variants, where it doesn't look great, but it kind of works.

Comment 24

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

updated to tip

Comment 25

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 512816 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

a=beltzner

Comment 26

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ed3437b7c12b

Comment 27

[Yann Brelière]

Attachment: Firefox 4 with Ambiance theme

Comment 28

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Looks awesome. Particularly with Ambiance. Thanks so much for getting this done in time for Firefox 4!

Comment 29

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

Uhm... has anyone tested this with a normal theme, like clearlooks? the latest build looks incredibly stupid because there is no longer a line between the tabs and the toolbar...

Comment 30

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to comment #29)
> Uhm... has anyone tested this with a normal theme, like clearlooks? the latest
> build looks incredibly stupid because there is no longer a line between the
> tabs and the toolbar...

I am not seeing this. Could you post a screenshot please?

Comment 31

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #30)
> Could you post a screenshot please?

(In a new bug.)

Comment 32

[Michael Monreal [:micmon]]

(In reply to comment #31)
> (In a new bug.)

=> bug #635458

Comment 33

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

Another bug I filed after that change: bug 636152