1790612 - UI feature: back and forward buttons to change to hourglass while action takes effect

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ed Avis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:105.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/105.0

Steps to reproduce:

When you hit Back, the page icon (favicon) in the tab bar changes to an hourglass while the previous version of the page is loaded. The hourglass disappears once the page is fully loaded.

Actual results:

However, the Back button itself does not give any visual feedback. You press it, and you can then glance up to the tab bar to see the hourglass appear, but the button itself shows no indicator of whether the previous page has completed loading.

Expected results:

The Back button itself should show an hourglass or some other visual indicator that the operation is in progress. This would be a usability enhancement because you can see it immediately, without needing to look away from the button towards the tab bar. (Moving your human eyes' focus from the button to the tab can take a bit of time, especially if there are many tabs open and you have to find the right one.)

The behaviour can be exactly the same as already happens for the hourglass in the tab bar: if you hit Back, then while an hourglass is shown replacing the favicon in the tab, a visual indicator is also shown for the Back button you just pressed. It would not need to be an hourglass; something more subtle would be fine, but some visual cue that the operation is still in progress and then that it's complete.

Similarly, the Forward button should change appearance while the new page is being loaded and change back once complete.

I am not referring to the greyed-out Back that appears when there is no previous page, nor the greyed-out Forward for no next page. I mean when you are in the middle of a trail of pages, able to go forward and back, but you can't easily see when your Back or Forward action has completed, unless you look away from the button to see if there's an hourglass in the tab.