1386919 - Removal of blue focused tab in Dark Theme makes it near impossible to tell focused tab from unfocused ones

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Greg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.78 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Nightly updated to v57 and now has poorly thought through Dark Theme elements.


Actual results:

The Dark Theme no longer uses a blue tab to indicate which tab has focus. Because of this it is now near impossible to tell which tab has focus. Apparently firefox is going to get a "blue line" across the focused tab? The mockups I've seen for this implementation are not impressive. More needs to be done to differentiate which tab has focus. It is important to always consider people with visual disabilities when making decisions like has been done here: removal of a clear focus-indicator to one that is near impossible to differentiate from other non-focused ones.

What is the argument for abandoning the blue tab for indicating focus? A "blue line" across the top of the focused tab is not a sufficient indication of focus.


Expected results:

The focused tab should be clearly differentiated from the other non-focused tabs. The entire focused tab should be a different color or a dramatically different shade. Nothing about the difference should be subtle.

The decision to switch the color of the focused tab was clearly poorly thought through. The decision to have a blue line differentiating tabs should be abandoned until a better design is put forward.

Comment 1

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

Sorry, I don't think this bug report is constructive. You're mainly saying the blue line is bad without having possibly used it for your daily browsing (it didn't land in Nightly yet).

I'll bring it up in the triage meeting, but I don't think we will revert this decision.

Comment 2

[sean]

I just got the update to 57.0a1 (2017-08-03) (64-bit) [yes, I can see there's a newer update pending already] and it got the new blue bar across the active tab.  

I have the titlebar enabled, which doesn't use the default dark theme, so I can't speak to the usability of that.  

However, I do use container tabs and I can say that there is _absolutely_no_way_ that I can now tell whether my active tab is a container tab or not!

Comment 3

[Greg]

(In reply to Johann Hofmann [:johannh] from comment #1)
> Sorry, I don't think this bug report is constructive. You're mainly saying
> the blue line is bad without having possibly used it for your daily browsing
> (it didn't land in Nightly yet).
> 
> I'll bring it up in the triage meeting, but I don't think we will revert
> this decision.

Johann, I know "the blue line" is bad because I know UI design. You guys are hardly the first entity to put forward bad a UI design. You are doing the same thing with Bug 1387762.

You are not considering people with visual disabilities. Not only that, you had a great design in the Developer Theme that many, many Firefox users argued and fought for when you removed it from firefox (before an extension was made available by Mozilla). Now you have removed the extension and gone with a Dark Theme that removed the core features of the Developer Theme that Firefox users liked so much and fought for.

I have used the "blue line" for my browsing for the last several days. And I have used "blue line" designs in the past, which is how I know right away this is the wrong way to go with your design. Not to mention you are moving away from the Developer Theme which is a superior design.

Users argued strongly against rounded tabs and Australis's huge freaking toolbar. You ignored them. Now you are bringing back square tabs and compact toolbar. Yea!

Users argued strongly for Developer Theme. Now you are taking away the best features of Developer Theme for an inferior one. Why not save yourselves the headache and stop changing the best parts of things? Things that are superior because they offer better usability and functionality for how people use a web-browser. Has real thought gone into the new Dark Theme? Or was it just guys like you saying we need a change and saying that arguments against it are not constructive?

Has anyone asked why the Developer Theme was so popular and why users liked it so much? Well, you are removing things that made it so great.

It's frustrating reporting these bugs because I see them sit around for a few years and THEN you implement the fix; whereas, you would be better off listening from the start and sticking with what works better from the beginning.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to sean from comment #2)
> However, I do use container tabs and I can say that there is
> _absolutely_no_way_ that I can now tell whether my active tab is a container
> tab or not!

This is covered by bug 1387117. If it's still not usable after the fix from that bug has landed in your nightly, please file a separate bug.


(In reply to Greg from comment #3)

This entire comment questions people's motives and assumes bad faith, and does not offer even any reasonable arguments why the previous style was better apart from an appeal to your own authority ("I know UI design, your design is bad"). This is not acceptable behaviour in bugzilla. Please see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html .

A more constructive approach would be to point out what the contrast ratio of the blue line vs. background is (ie the color that part of the tab would have if it were missing), and whether it is too low according to WCAG AA/AAA standards (though even that would be a bit questionable given that those are about text legibility, not about "can I see whether there is or isn't a line there").

Comment 5

[sean]

@:Gijs - Thank you for pointing me to the correct bug report.  (I had looked for one, and this was the closest I found.  Granted, I had been searching for "active tab", "highlighted tab", "blue", etc.; I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to search for "container" :facepalm:)

Comment 6

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

Thanks for the feedback. We aren't going back to the full tab color for active tab. If there are functional problems with the line tab indicator (e.g. it's not the correct height, or it's getting clipped) please file bugs for that.