1402034 - Could the URL bar be hide-able as soon as page first renders, rather than waiting for all content to load?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Toolbar, defect)

Description

[Mark]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_5) AppleWebKit/603.2.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.1.1 Safari/603.2.4

Steps to reproduce:

Load any page on a slow connection


Actual results:

URL bar hangs around longer than it needs to. 


Expected results:

URL bar could auto-hide as soon as page is read-able, just leaving the progress bar visible.

The page can be read-able and scroll-able even though it has not finished loading. The URL bar won't hide until the progress bar reaches the very right hand side. Which can take many many seconds on a slow connection.

On a small screen device with taller Firefox 57 URL bar it's quite a lot of the screen height "wasted" during that time.

Samsung Internet Browser for Android does it nicely, the URL bar will slide out of view as soon as the page is read-able. The progress bar remains at the very top of the screen.

Just a thought :)

Comment 1

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

I meant to get clearance for explanation before closing this. I will post a follow up once I am able to explain in more detail why the toolbar does work this way.

Comment 2

[Mark]

Fair enough. It doesn't sound like I can convince you guys but here's a pleading paragraph or two...

Firefox Focus (Android) does exactly what I requested. It's nice. Why can't its "big brother", Firefox, match that behaviour?

Chrome, Samsung Browser, Opera Mini, Dolphin, Lightning Browser, all do what I requested on Android.

More real estate sooner == better surely?

On my little Sony I have 8 cm vertical of page to look at while the URL bar is visible. If the URL got out of the way ASAP I would have nearly 9 cm, that's >10% more screen space at little or no cost to useability.  You can see there are a bunch of "full screen" type add-ons for Fennec (some now broken with the move to WebExtensions) and they seem fairly popular. So there is some demand for maximum screen real estate ASAP.

Ah well, I tried ;) cheers now.

Comment 3

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

To be clear, all the other browsers you mentioned are Chromium based including Firefox Focus. Firefox for Android worked this way until version 53. It was changed for security reasons which I can't elaborate on until the vulnerability is made public.

Comment 4

[Mark]

OK sorry to take up your time and thanks for Firefox.

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

There might be alternate ways to fix the spoof in bug 1344517. Always re-showing the location bar when you switch from one tab to another might go a long way.

Comment 6

[Randall Barker [:rbarker]]

(In reply to Daniel Veditz [:dveditz] from comment #5)
> There might be alternate ways to fix the spoof in bug 1344517. Always
> re-showing the location bar when you switch from one tab to another might go
> a long way.

I don't believe it is possible to change tabs with out showing the toolbar in Fennec. The issue as I understood it was that redirecting on a scroll event while the page was loading would first hide the toolbar, then allow the attacker to show a false toolbar on the page the user was redirected to. By forcing the toolbar to be visible while loading means the toolbar will remain visible on the redirect and the user will see both the real toolbar and the fake one.