769170 - Autohide menubar in webapp runtime

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Webapp Runtime, defect, P3)

Description

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

The menubar is always present in the runtime but rarely useful, and it breaks the visual immersion for a webapp. It's useful only to host the edit commands, but those can be accessed by their shortcuts that most people know.

We should make it behave like in Firefox where it's hidden by default, but it's still accessible and is made visible when the user presses Alt.
(doesn't apply to Mac of course where the menubar is not part of the window)


Myk, Jsmith, Jennifer: thoughts about this change? who should ui-review it?

Comment 1

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Attachment: Patch

Dão, since I've already written the patch, I'm going ahead and post it. But it's up to you if you want to cancel the review for now and wait on ui-review before reviewing it.

Most of the patch is moving indentation in webapp.xul, so here's a hg diff -w to show the actual changes ignoring whitespaces: http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1681966

Comment 2

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Attachment: Before and after

Screenshot with before and after appearance on Windows 7

Comment 3

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Felipe Gomes (:felipe) from comment #0)
> The menubar is always present in the runtime but rarely useful, and it
> breaks the visual immersion for a webapp. It's useful only to host the edit
> commands, but those can be accessed by their shortcuts that most people know.
> 
> We should make it behave like in Firefox where it's hidden by default, but
> it's still accessible and is made visible when the user presses Alt.
> (doesn't apply to Mac of course where the menubar is not part of the window)
> 
> 
> Myk, Jsmith, Jennifer: thoughts about this change? who should ui-review it?

I like the proposed idea overall, as I've found the menu to be interrupting to the apps experience so far.

For auto-hiding though, is relying only on a keyboard shortcut to get the menu a good UX though? And how would I know that a menu even exists when it's hidden by default? Has there been any thought into a panel-style menu or the giant firefox button like menu in the top left corner?

I'm wondering if there is something we can do here to still indicate that a menu does exist, allow the user to know how to get to it visually, but also not be obtrusive to the apps experience.

Jen - for ui-review, should that Bryan Clark (although I know he's quite busy)? Or could Maria review something like this?

(In reply to Felipe Gomes (:felipe) from comment #2)
> Created attachment 637415 [details]
> Before and after
> 
> Screenshot with before and after appearance on Windows 7

Hmm. For some reason, I can't see the attachment here in Firefox and Chrome. Don't know why...

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Felipe Gomes (:felipe) from comment #0)
> The menubar is always present in the runtime but rarely useful, and it
> breaks the visual immersion for a webapp. It's useful only to host the edit
> commands, but those can be accessed by their shortcuts that most people know.

Most Mozillians, perhaps.  Or most power users.  Not likely most Firefox users.


> We should make it behave like in Firefox where it's hidden by default, but
> it's still accessible and is made visible when the user presses Alt.
> (doesn't apply to Mac of course where the menubar is not part of the window)
> 
> 
> Myk, Jsmith, Jennifer: thoughts about this change? who should ui-review it?

The desktop webapp runtime does not currently have a UX designer, so I've been helping out on UX issues.  And my sense here is that we can't assume users know about and prefer keyboard shortcuts for the commands we currently expose via the menubar, because most users don't use keyboard shortcuts.

Usage of these particular shortcuts might be higher, and I don't have hard numbers for them, but here are a couple of instructive texts about another popular shortcut (and shortcuts generally):

http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2011/08/25/do-90-of-people-not-use-ctrlf/
http://pro.sagepub.com/content/48/5/803.short


Note that Firefox also exposes these commands via a context menu, but the desktop runtime does not (yet?).  Also, I'm drafting a proposal for a native menu API that will create the Firefox-like combination of a unified menu that is visible by default and a menubar that is hidden by default.  (The current early draft of the proposal is at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/Menus.)

Comment 5

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez] from comment #4)
> Note that Firefox also exposes these commands via a context menu, but the
> desktop runtime does not (yet?).  Also, I'm drafting a proposal for a native
> menu API that will create the Firefox-like combination of a unified menu
> that is visible by default and a menubar that is hidden by default.  (The
> current early draft of the proposal is at
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/Menus.)

This would be wonderful for webapp developers!
In my opinion, while we work to support this awesome feature, we should enable the context menu and disable the menu bar. I think most users use the context menu to copy & paste.

Comment 6

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio from comment #5)
> (In reply to Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez] from comment #4)
> > Note that Firefox also exposes these commands via a context menu, but the
> > desktop runtime does not (yet?).  Also, I'm drafting a proposal for a native
> > menu API that will create the Firefox-like combination of a unified menu
> > that is visible by default and a menubar that is hidden by default.  (The
> > current early draft of the proposal is at
> > https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/Menus.)
> 
> This would be wonderful for webapp developers!
> In my opinion, while we work to support this awesome feature, we should
> enable the context menu and disable the menu bar. I think most users use the
> context menu to copy & paste.

Note - We'll need to add support to copy & paste from a context menu as well in-app. I don't think we support that yet...

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Felipe Gomes (:felipe) from comment #0)
> We should make it behave like in Firefox where it's hidden by default, but
> it's still accessible and is made visible when the user presses Alt.

However, Firefox also provides an alternative menu for mouse users.

> (doesn't apply to Mac of course where the menubar is not part of the window)

We also didn't do it on Linux, since this isn't native behavior there and Alt doesn't show the menu bar (you need to press a letter in addition to Alt).

Comment 8

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #7)
> We also didn't do it on Linux, since this isn't native behavior there and
> Alt doesn't show the menu bar (you need to press a letter in addition to
> Alt).

And in the future the menu on Linux will be like on Mac (on Ubuntu) or like this: https://bug513159.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=461240

Comment 9

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

So if a context menu was implemented as the alternative for mouse users, would we remove the menubar? Or would we need more time and data to decide what to do?

Comment 10

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to :Felipe Gomes [offline 20-24, slow resp. 25-28] from comment #9)
> So if a context menu was implemented as the alternative for mouse users,
> would we remove the menubar? Or would we need more time and data to decide
> what to do?

I doubt context menu usage is much greater than keyboard shortcut usage, but in any case we already know what to do: implement a native menu API with an autohidden menubar and autovisible unified menu.

Comment 11

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Maybe we could hide the menu bar by default when an application doesn't provide a custom menu.
I've filed bug 775962 for the native menu API.

Comment 12

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio from comment #11)
> Maybe we could hide the menu bar by default when an application doesn't
> provide a custom menu.

That would also hide the platform-default menus, which we shouldn't do.


> I've filed bug 775962 for the native menu API.

Thanks Marco!

Comment 13

[Simon Sapin (:SimonSapin)]

If this isn’t the default, could there be a way for apps or users to opt into hiding the menu bar?

Comment 14

[Simon Sapin (:SimonSapin)]

I’ve found a work-around that works for me:

    cd ~/.glowingbear-*/*.default
    mkdir chrome
    echo '#main-menubar { display: none !important; }' > chrome/userChrome.css

Comment 15

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per bug 1238079, we're going to disable the desktop web runtime and remove it from the codebase, so we won't fix these bugs in it.