943037 - Move tabs button to left and slide out tabs tray as per navigation drawer

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131121065529

Steps to reproduce:

In what would almost be a full 360 back to the days of XUL Firefox, I'm suggesting that the tabs drawer should move to the left of the screen to fall in line with how tabs are handled on tablets and this would also be consistent with Google's own (very popular) navigation drawer design guideline.

Comment 1

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Paul, are you talking about the phone browser UI? What would be your rationale for making a change like this, other than the similarity to tablets?

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

Yes Ian, I'm indeed thinking about the Fennec phone UI. It's about cohesion, not only with the tablet UI but with the rest of the platform where navigation at the top left is a key principle of the Android platform. Minimising the learning curve and ensuring similarity across the platform should (at least IMO) be a goal for Firefox. I believe that synergy in our approach can only serve as benefit to the product and the end-user. Especially considering the popularity of the Navigation Drawer which is used by Google Play, Kindle, Gmail, Email (KitKat+), PayPal, Foursquare and Flickr just to name a few highly visible apps.

Comment 3

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

It's worth considering. I should mention, though, that we're planning a tablet browser refresh, part of which may do away with sidebar-based tab navigation. Between that and the fact that the left drawer, while popular on android, is a real ergonomic pain for right handed users of large phones (the top left corner is about as far away from your thumb as you can get), I can't say I'm 100% sold on this approach. 

Having said all that, we can keep your option in mind when we get to a point where we want to revisit our phone tab structure (something I hope for us to do in 2014).

Comment 4

[Teodora Vermesan (:TeoVermesan)]

 
> Having said all that, we can keep your option in mind when we get to a point
> where we want to revisit our phone tab structure (something I hope for us to
> do in 2014).


Hi! What's the status of this?

Comment 5

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

(In reply to Teodora Vermesan (:TeoVermesan) from comment #4)
>  
> > Having said all that, we can keep your option in mind when we get to a point
> > where we want to revisit our phone tab structure (something I hope for us to
> > do in 2014).
> 
> 
> Hi! What's the status of this?

We're going to start brainstorming designs soon. The way we've been talking so far, though, it's fairly unlikely that the new tab interface will use a 'tab drawer' as is being suggested here.

Comment 6

[smartfon.reddit]

I've seen a few 3-4 year old suggestions that were marked as WONTFIX. Is there a chance you could reconsider this now that Photon redesign is happening? Today's flagships are a full inch larger than they were 3-4 years ago. Fennec is one of the few browsers that I've tried that requires two handed navigation. Several Chromium based browsers have either switched to bottom address bar, or added an option to swipe the left/right edge to open specific elements. Chrome will follow suit soon.