1289131 - Should custom containers have the same color icon?

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Security, defect, P5)

Description

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

Attachment: Selection_249.png

It looks to me wrong when the icon is different in colour. If the icon is to remain the same, I think we need some form of other indicator on about:containers.

Comment 1

[Tanvi Vyas[:tanvi]]

The icon color should match.  There are a few different scenarios here:

1) We could pick a color and the icon would change to that color.  So the user would choose the color and icon independently.  So if the user picks the plane dot and the color yellow, you will have a yellow dot.  If the user picks the fingerprint, you would have a yellow fingerprint.  But you shouldn't be able to reuse color/icon combinations.  Really, you shouldn't be able to reuse colors at all because then the tab highlighting will not let you distinguish between two containers.

2) Make the user pick the color and icon at the same time.  So they can pick a pink shopping cart, or a yellow dot, or a red dot, or a green dollar sign, etc.  Once one is picked, it can't be picked for another container.

3) Reserve the 4 predefined icons for the 4 predefined containers.  They can't be used for any other container.  But, if the user renames "Shopping" to "Social", they could pick a dot icon instead of the shopping cart and even change the color.  They just can't use the shopping cart for something else then.

This is not ideal, since it means that we have a maximum number of containers (i.e. the maximum number of color/icon combinations).  Unless we a) put in a color chooser and let the user define their own color, maybe even let them input it with hex; or b) let the user upload custom icons.  I really don't want to do b) yet, that seems like a whole lot of engineering when we aren't sure if users will really even do that.  For most users, the number of color/icon combinations will be enough.  For developers who may need more, we could design something special.

For now I would do the easiest thing implementation wise from the 3 options listed above.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

So if the icon should match, the indicator of the tab colour in about:containers will be the icon itself.

I think the restriction is more important on the colors matching, we could however leave that up to the users to decide. Perhaps they want three work related tabs like "Work", "Work - google", "Work - search" and then the same for personal.

For now perhaps we leave this bug to just implementing the variable SVG colours and changing that, we could do follow up work to restrict icon or colour combos if needed?

Comment 3

[Tanvi Vyas[:tanvi]]

Hey Jonathan,

Sorry, I'm a little confused by your reply.  Can you clarify for me?

(In reply to Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] from comment #2)
> So if the icon should match, the indicator of the tab colour in
> about:containers will be the icon itself.
> 
> I think the restriction is more important on the colors matching, we could
> however leave that up to the users to decide. Perhaps they want three work
> related tabs like "Work", "Work - google", "Work - search" and then the same
> for personal.
Would all 3 work be different colors with the same icon?


> For now perhaps we leave this bug to just implementing the variable SVG
> colours and changing that, we could do follow up work to restrict icon or
> colour combos if needed?

What do you mean?

Thanks!

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

Sorry missed this too, feel free to needinfo me. I get nagged better.

Yeah so three briefcase icons and three fingerprint icons with only two colours blue and orange. I meant to say all three matching. So long as a user can distinguish somehow, they might prefer to have "work social" and "work email" be a briefcase and orange but can check the urlbar when they start using.

I meant the issue here was implementing the changing icon colours, if we want to restrict the user to what they can do (which I think is a bad idea without user feedback) we should do that in another bug.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

The initial here was about keeping icon colors the same and permitting text highlighting to be different. The patch in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278177 fixes this so it's only one color.