1477507 - Proposal for a more space-efficient titlebar layout

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Frank]

Attachment: Proposal: Standard view

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
Build ID: 20180710113641

Steps to reproduce:

I saw the mock-ups for the new CSD titlebar layout, but there are two points which I don’t really like that good.

• The small grab area on top of the tabs is really small and maybe hard to grab for older people.
• In contrast to all other titlebars used in other applications, the controls aren’t on top but instead below the tabs in the second row. That’s of course a minor point, but I like consistency. :)
• I’m one of those big fans of Tab Center Redux, as I usually have to work with a lot of tabs and need to keep a good overview, for which tabs in a sidebar is unavoidable. While the tab sidebar currently shows the tabs redundantly, In future, the top tab bar should therefore be disabled. Then this would again lead to an empty and therefore pretty much useless title bar.

I therefore have created a mock-up of a better layout:

• I’d like the address box to change into the tab title for as long as the mouse doesn’t hover above that widget, like it’s done by the Eolie browser.
• With those two widgets combined, you could put the whole content of the address bar into the title bar.

Advantages:
• This results in a larger grabbing space (both sides of the title).
• With the tab bar hidden, just one bar would remain.
• More consistency with other CSD windows (at least on Gnome). Nautilus for example has the same title bar layout (when you press Ctrl+L, you see the breadcrumps bar transforming into a address bar).

Comment 1

[Frank]

Attachment: Proposal: View at hovering over the window title (or editing it)

Comment 2

[Frank]

Attachment: Reference/example: Nautilus (normal view)

Comment 3

[Frank]

Attachment: Reference/example: Nautilus (address editing view)

Comment 4

[Frank]

Any thoughts?

Comment 5

[Frank]

Ok, now with the titlebar change of v67 you merged title bar, so that some parts mentioned above doesn’t apply anymore. Yet, Firefox’s header bar is completely out-of-band in comparison to all other GTK programs. From the current point, my proposal would now swap both sub bars of the header bar. This still would be good, as Firefox would then align to stay consistent with all other programs.

Furthermore, the tab bar should be hidden for active tab sidebars (see Tab Center Redux test pilot/extension), which in turn also means, that these bars should be swapped.