1108584 - Increase height of action bar to match Material Guidelines

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

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

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20141202213802

Steps to reproduce:

Some of the work can start a little earlier this time. Increasing the height of our action bar to 56dp for phones isn't a huge undertaking.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

What's the basis here? Is this in spec?

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

The Material Action Bar should be 56dpi.

http://www.google.com/design/spec/layout/metrics-keylines.html#metrics-keylines-keylines-spacing

Comment 3

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 2.50.55 PM.png

I think this is a WONTFIX right now.

While it's true that the standard of L is now 56dp, I don't think we can just change ours (now 48dp) quite so simply. I don't know if this is something that we necessarily want. I've studied these guidelines extensively and while they're great recommendations, we don't have to fully commit to them.

From the screen shot, you can see that the current size and dimensions were not considered lightly. Looking at the Toolbar updates work in bug 1052004 and all the Tablet stuff in bug 1014156, the proportions actually work together in a very specific way.

I can definitely consider this as part of the tool bar v2 changes (bug 1058663) but it'll affect large parts of our other UI too (curve, tablet, input bar 9-patch, etc) so I'd say it's a WONTFIX right now.

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #3)
> Created attachment 8545500 [details]
> Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 2.50.55 PM.png
> 
> I think this is a WONTFIX right now.
> 
> While it's true that the standard of L is now 56dp, I don't think we can
> just change ours (now 48dp) quite so simply. I don't know if this is
> something that we necessarily want. I've studied these guidelines
> extensively and while they're great recommendations, we don't have to fully
> commit to them.
> 
> From the screen shot, you can see that the current size and dimensions were
> not considered lightly. Looking at the Toolbar updates work in bug 1052004
> and all the Tablet stuff in bug 1014156, the proportions actually work
> together in a very specific way.
> 
> I can definitely consider this as part of the tool bar v2 changes (bug
> 1058663) but it'll affect large parts of our other UI too (curve, tablet,
> input bar 9-patch, etc) so I'd say it's a WONTFIX right now.

While I get that this is a change that would require more work than simply increasing the height of the action bar, the discussion regarding things like the curve were raised in bug 1074220 in which you posted in September.

The Android L preview came out at the end of June and since then app developers have been making efforts to make their apps feel modern (Material). Chrome has already updated and we, for all intents and purposes now ship a dated UI. I accept that for many reasons, we're only just implementing Holo refinements and it's for that reason that we can't set this to WONTFIX. In bug 1074220 lucasr attempted to start the discussion regarding certain of our UI choices, explicitly the curve and move this browser forward, I was initially sceptical as I was someone that championed the curve and the at-a-glance branding that it provided for Firefox on Android, but after using Lollipop, the constraints of the curve outweigh the benefits. 

In no way can we accept that because work to give Fennec a more modern feel within the previous design language of the platform is still undergoing that it's okay to not move forward here or with any other Lollipop modifications/enhancements/refinements, particularly when at this point we've had almost six months to begin these discussions.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Anthony, bug 1130376 is an issue where the page content in the recent apps menu is cut off because our toolbar is non-standard sized. I think this gives us more reason to move towards the standard 56dp height toolbar. Any thoughts?

Comment 7

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #6)
> Anthony, bug 1130376 is an issue where the page content in the recent apps
> menu is cut off because our toolbar is non-standard sized. I think this
> gives us more reason to move towards the standard 56dp height toolbar. Any
> thoughts?

Possibly, though reading back now, this bug is about the Action Bar. Didn't we discuss this in a Tablet bug about the action bar before?

Comment 8

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Anthony Lam (:antlam) from comment #7)
> Possibly, though reading back now, this bug is about the Action Bar. Didn't
> we discuss this in a Tablet bug about the action bar before?

"action bar" refers to the toolbar and it's state we normally call the "action bar" (e.g. select all, copy, paste).

Comment 9

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

Gotcha, then it seems like we should keep this bug around. As we move towards a better overall "L" experience, this will be something to keep in mind.

Comment 10

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Note that Android L also introduces the new Toolbar API, which replaces the "Action Bar" API. It's backwards compatible, provided we import the appropriate support library. See bug 1126061 for implementation (it'll be a while).

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

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