491374 - Make the tabs look good on Mac OS X

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Attachment: like this, for example

(I've stolen these tabs from the GrApple Delicious theme for Firefox with permission from Aronnax.)

I've got several problems with the current tabs:
 - They're upside down. In Thunderbird that makes even less sense than in
   Firefox.
 - Background tabs are unnecessarily visually noisy. Almost every tab
   implementation I've seen on Mac OS X doesn't show outlines for background
   tabs. Only showing thin separator lines is much cleaner.
 - Tab close buttons are on the right. We all know that that's wrong on OS X.
 - They don't look crisp enough.

My proposal solves all these problems. I've chosen to center the "favicons" together with the tab text. This solution has originally been suggested by timeless in bug 349108 comment 8, who points out that that's the way OS X windows deal with proxy icons in the titlebar.

How do people feel about this design?

Comment 1

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Attachment: wip patch v1

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Comment on attachment 375694 [details]
like this, for example

Firstly I'm not the UI expert for Thunderbird (Bryan is).

Secondly, I think this is the wrong thing to do for several reasons:

- Firefox and Thunderbird have moved to being more Mac like in appearance to fit in with the native applications.

- This patch would mean Thunderbird looks different to Firefox. Given these two are effectively sister products, I think that's a bad idea.

- The 'x' is on the other side to Firefox, this will be confusing to users using them side-by-side.

- The tabs look too square.

If it was me, I wouldn't take it because of the differences when compared to Firefox.

Comment 3

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> - Firefox and Thunderbird have moved to being more Mac like in appearance to
> fit in with the native applications.

I don't understand this reason. The other reasons make sense to me, though.

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 375694 [details]
like this, for example

This is really nice!

I think the centered icon and close button on the left is more consistent with safari and other mac apps.  Consistent isn't really obvious in this area on the mac platform.  And I'm not sure how they actually make use of the centered icon.

I don't think we can accept this as we are trying to match Firefox and look more like native mac applications (at the same time) so for tabs we are defaulting to the how Firefox are structuring their tabs.

I'm hoping I can convince you to change your patch into an extension that we can upload into addons as I think a lot of other people will like this; it's just not the direction I think we can take.

Check out the extension wizard for getting the framework: http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/extensionwiz/

And then email me when you have something you've uploaded to http://addons.mozilla.org and I'll get it pushed into the regular extensions circle.

Comment 5

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Comment on attachment 375695 [details] [diff] [review]
wip patch v1

Patch is obsolete, up for a new patch? :)

$ patch -p1 --dry-run < ~/Desktop/491374patch.diff 
patching file mail/themes/pinstripe/jar.mn
Hunk #1 FAILED at 126.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 260.
2 out of 2 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file mail/themes/pinstripe/jar.mn.rej
patching file mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmail.css
Hunk #1 FAILED at 44.
1 out of 1 hunk FAILED -- saving rejects to file mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmail.css.rej
can't find file to patch at input line 460
Perhaps you used the wrong -p or --strip option?
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|diff --git a/mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmailBindings.xml b/mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmailBindings.xml
|--- a/mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmailBindings.xml
|+++ b/mail/themes/pinstripe/mail/tabmailBindings.xml
--------------------------
File to patch:

Comment 6

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Firefox recently changed their appearance of their tabs to be on the top, have less of a noisy background and a bit of a crisper appearance in bug 579632. I like that! Steven Horlander said they are still in a unsteady state though (bug 547787 takes care of parts of that I think).

Comment 7

[Nomis101]

(In reply to comment #6)
> (bug 547787 takes care of parts of that I think).
Thats an interesting bug. I think its a cool idea to use svg and svg:mask for that. Would be cool to do the same for TB. :-)

Comment 8

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Patch is obsolete, up for a new patch? :)

Sorry, no time at the moment... :(

Comment 9

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Is this bug still valid with the Australis tabs?

Comment 10

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Nope, looks good to me now.