1707686 - Tab bar too big in compact mode

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Theme, defect, P5)

Description

[Peter deHaan [:pdehaan]]

This comment is copy/pasted from a community issue filed during the Foxfooding program.

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Firefox Version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0
Window Size (inner width and height): 1278x1335

Steps to Reproduce

Set UI density to compact

Expected Behavior

Reduce height of tab bar in compact mode

Actual Behavior

Does not reduce height of tab bar, only address bar.

Comment 1

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Bug 1707686 - Improve proton compact density for tabbar and urlbar. r=harry,jaws

Comment 2

[Patrick Storz]

After https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1697293 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1697623 I've played a bit more to get tab bar and location bar sizes down, finally reaching a compactness level comparable to current stable Firefox.

I'll attach some screenshots.

What do you think Tim? Too much or "just right"?

Comment 3

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Comparison of current "compact", updated "compact" and stable release "compact"

Comment 4

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Screenshot of changes

Comment 5

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

We've decided to leave the current dimensions of compact mode unchanged for the time being. If you have some time available it would be great to get some attention on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706713

Comment 6

[Patrick Storz]

Hi Jared,

can you or Aaron please explain what parts of my patch were undesirable and why, so we can iterate it (instead of just closing this issue which is rude and prevents us from making any progress)?

You might have noticed my patch included multiple changes to the tabbar, and also a change related to location bar, achieving the overall goal of making the "compact" density option actually compact, so imroved the overall design of the "compact" density option in my opinion.

Also I have to ask: Why close this issue? The tab bar is still quite big, actually almost as big as in the "Normal" density mode, so I don't see that this issue is actually resolved. A "wontfix" would mean you basically don't want the "compact" density mode to be compact? I'm sure there's some kind of misunderstanding here!

I understand the compact mode was not the desired design by the UX team to begin with, so I understand some compromising might be necessary here, but we re-introduced a compact mode after all, so we need to work on making it actually compact. If it is just an almost identical clone of the normal mode, it does indeed serve no purpose (because it will only add maintenance overhead while still not making anybody of the users preferring a compact design happy).

We've decided to leave the current dimensions of compact mode unchanged for the time being

Can you expand on the "for the time being"? Apparently you do agree there's room for improvement, so I assume there are Mozilla-internal plans to improve the current design (in that case please share them; I'm sure people would be delighted to hear them)? If there are no Mozilla-internal plans to work on this, I can only wonder more about the reaction here and in the Differential, because what better time would there be to improve upon the current design than now when I actually showed interest in working on it?

Comment 7

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Patrick Storz from comment #6)

can you or Aaron please explain what parts of my patch were undesirable and why, so we can iterate it (instead of just closing this issue which is rude and prevents us from making any progress)?

Apologies for coming across rude, sorry that wasn't my intent.

You might have noticed my patch included multiple changes to the tabbar, and also a change related to location bar, achieving the overall goal of making the "compact" density option actually compact, so imroved the overall design of the "compact" density option in my opinion.

While a compact density is indeed the goal of compact mode, we still want to have space around buttons. For example, having the close button reach the top, end, and bottom keeps everything very tight together, almost too tight.

There are a few cases that we need to make sure we handle well, and potentially if you can show some screenshots of these states it may make your argument stronger.

These are the states we need to consider:

• Pinned tabs
• Pinned tabs with the attention state showing (display JavaScript alert() dialog when the tab is in the background)
• Unpinned tabs with the attention state showing (display JavaScript alert() dialog when the tab is in the background)
• Audio playing on a pinned tab
• Audio playing on an unpinned tab
• WebRTC with microphone enabled on an unpinned tab

As for the location bar, can you show screenshots of the location bar with the page zoom showing?

Also I have to ask: Why close this issue? The tab bar is still quite big, actually almost as big as in the "Normal" density mode, so I don't see that this issue is actually resolved. A "wontfix" would mean you basically don't want the "compact" density mode to be compact? I'm sure there's some kind of misunderstanding here!

We're still trying to figure out what to do with compact mode. It's marked as "unsupported" in the product now, and the UX team doesn't have the resources available to dive deeper into what compact mode could be or if it makes sense to keep in the product. I'm sorry but I don't have more information to share here or I would.

I understand the compact mode was not the desired design by the UX team to begin with, so I understand some compromising might be necessary here, but we re-introduced a compact mode after all, so we need to work on making it actually compact. If it is just an almost identical clone of the normal mode, it does indeed serve no purpose (because it will only add maintenance overhead while still not making anybody of the users preferring a compact design happy).

We've decided to leave the current dimensions of compact mode unchanged for the time being

Can you expand on the "for the time being"? Apparently you do agree there's room for improvement, so I assume there are Mozilla-internal plans to improve the current design (in that case please share them; I'm sure people would be delighted to hear them)? If there are no Mozilla-internal plans to work on this, I can only wonder more about the reaction here and in the Differential, because what better time would there be to improve upon the current design than now when I actually showed interest in working on it?

Please see my comment above as to what I meant by "for the time being". I'm not exactly sure what the path of compact mode will be over time and as such I don't want to guess what will happen. As it stands now, we want to make sure that we don't put too much resources behind it simply because we don't know what we will choose to do in the future. Even if a patch comes to us from a contributor, it will still require UX review, QA testing, and potential follow-up bug fixes.

Comment 8

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Updated "compact" showing page zoom indicator

Comment 9

[Patrick Storz]

Attachment: Updated "compact" showing pinned tab, mute button, webrtc icon and green indicator

Comment 10

[Patrick Storz]

Thanks for the answer Jared! Obviously it's not exactly the one I had hoped for (i.e. the UX team not having the resources to figure out what to do) but it explains some of the actions and answers surrounding this change. Ideally these questions obviously would've been investigated and answered before even starting to plan to land Proton, instead of leaving some users with an "unsupported" option.

I've attached some screenshots. I believe the mute button (both on pinned and unpinned tabs) as well as the page zoom indicator in the location bar are fine already. The green indicator is still shifted (which is to be expected with https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1706713) but shouldn't be hard to fix either.

If I can get some indication that these changes have any chance of even being considered I'm more than happy to continue work on it.

Comment 11

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Patrick Storz from comment #10)

If I can get some indication that these changes have any chance of even being considered I'm more than happy to continue work on it.

Further investment in compact mode is a decision that the Product team will need to make. I've redirected the Needinfo to Shilpa. She should be able to provide an answer here.

Comment 12

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

I believe compact mode can be made more compact (not necessarily as much as the old one) without necessarily adding too much cost.

I'm confident a patch only changing --tab-min-height or/and --urlbar-min-height will make lots of people happy without necessarily adding cost.

I'll leave finding the right values up to the patch author, but as long as they don't require adding extra lines of CSS (which might mean needing to compromise on compactness), it should be ok in terms of cost.

Comment 13

[Patrick Storz]

Thanks Tim, I have a minimal fix changing only those two lines here and ready to commit as well.

I'll leave the full diff in https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D114692 for now (also because it corresponds to the screenshots), so Shilpa can comment on what parts seem acceptable and which parts she thinks are problematic. (It's really a tiny diff as it is, so I hope the number of lines changed won't stand in the way of making the best of compact mode for users.)

Comment 14

[will]

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #11)

(In reply to Patrick Storz from comment #10)

If I can get some indication that these changes have any chance of even being considered I'm more than happy to continue work on it.

Further investment in compact mode is a decision that the Product team will need to make. I've redirected the Needinfo to Shilpa. She should be able to provide an answer here.

Just an additional vote for keeping Compact Mode! I actually really like the Proton redesign as long as Compact Mode is turned on. Without it, I just find that the tab bar uses too much vertical space with no additional information displayed.

Comment 15

[Pascal Chevrel (relman team) -> :pascalc]

Moving the NI to Romain

Comment 16

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Comment 18

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Comment 19

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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