1827502 - Hamburger menu button is present in popup window's toolbar, occupying precious space without obviously being useful

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: testcase 1

Followup to bug 1827034: we should consider hiding the hamburger menu icon from the toolbar for pop-up windows.

STR to exercise this behavior:

1. Load attached testcase.
2. Click any of the buttons.
   (or, for a real-world use case: visit https://www.sfcu.org/ and click "Live Chat" at the top, to open a small popup window)

ACTUAL RESULTS:
Hamburger menu is present to the right of the URLbar. It's the only thing in the toolbar, aside from the URLbar (and maybe the unified extension menu button, though that's going away in bug 1827034).

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Maybe no hamburger menu should be present.

"expected results" are based on Safari/Chrome behavior, and also on the usefulness of the hamburger menu's options as applied to the popup itself. I'll add a comment with more thoughts on that.

NOTABLE BENEFITS:
If we remove the hamburger menu, we end up being able to show more of the URL, and we avoid the potential for overlapping UI like in bug 1827027.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(note, for small values, the hamburger menu actually overlaps the URL bar; that's bug 1827027, and emilio's looking to mitigate that over there, but a more-complete mitigation is perhaps just to hide this menu button -- hence this bug here.)

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #0)

"expected results" are based [...] on the usefulness of the hamburger menu's options as applied to the popup itself.

Further notes on the various options in the hamburger menu, and what they do when invoked from a popup window & how applicable/useful that is for the popup itself:
(1) Sign in [or sync submenu, if you're signed in]

• If you're not signed in: "Sign in" is the only option & just opens in the regular browser window.
• If you are signed in: most entries (Manage Account, Sync Settings, Connect another device) open a tab in the original window.
• The synced-tabs-from-other-devices section will let you open arbitrary pages in the popup, which is kinda cool but perhaps undesirable, given that we disable URLbar editing in the popup window. (Why would we disable URLbar editing to lock things down, and yet let you load arbitrary synced tabs?)

(2) New tab/window/private-window, Downloads, Passwords, Add-ons & Themes, Settings, Help submenu's entries:

• All of these take effect in some other window, not in the popup. (with the exception of Help|Report Deceptive Site, which opens in the popup for some reason; that might be a bug)

(3) Bookmarks/History: these let you open arbitrary URLs from your bookmarks/history in the popup, which (as noted above for sync) seems a little bit like it's hacking around the fact that we disable URLbar editing in the popup window.

(4) Print, Save page as, Find-in-page, Zoom: These all interact with the popup and are somewhat useful to have in a menu. Having said that, they're also exposed via well-known key combinations (discoverable-in-the-hamburger-menu, in regular windows, if the user happens to have the hamburger menu in their muscle memory and then wonder where to find them). Also: for "Save page as", the right-click context menu is another way to reach this feature.

(5) More tools (mostly developer tools): These sort-of work, and are sort-of broken.

• Web Developer Tools, Responsive Design Mode, Eyedropper: these all Just Work in the popup.
• "Remote Debugging" opens up a new tab in the popup window, which is not something you're supposed to be able to do. :) (Now that you have 2 tabs, you end up with creates a new-tab button to create more, but it doesn't work; it spawns tabs in the original window instead.)
• Task Manager, Browser Toolbox, Browser Console, Page Source, Extensions for Developers: All of these spawn a new window or a new-tab in the associated regular browser window (not in the popup)

(6) Quit: This works, it's debatable whether it's a useful option to surface in a small popup window.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I guess our current behavior (showing this menu) was as-requested in bug 1015163, and in this bug here, I'm effectively suggesting that we reconsider the tradeoffs of showing vs. hiding this menu-button, given that the menu is mostly irrelevant for the popup window. (And I think we're the only browser that shows any toolbar buttons at all outside-of/taking-space-from the URLbar, in popup windows.)

It looks like the motivation in bug 1015163 comment 0 was for menu access to "Print" and "Save". As it turns out, other browsers (Chrome/Edge and Safari) do offer menu access to "Print" and "Save" for popups, via the context-menu when you right-click blank space on a web page. Whereas Firefox offers "Save" in the context menu but does not have a context-menu-based way to "Print" currently.

So: if we were to take action here, we might want to consider adding a context-menu "print" option first. shrug

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1015163

:dao, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1015163, could you take a look?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

[ sorry, didn't mean to flag this as a regression exactly; I just wanted to associate it with the bug that introduced the UI which this bug here is proposing to remove. To avoid confusing bots & regression-averse release-management folks, let's consider this "depends on" bug 1015163 rather than "regressed by" bug 1015163. I'll leave the ni=dao open, though, for general thoughts on this hypothetical change]

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This should be raised with PM/UX, not engineering.

But honestly, I don't think we should reconsider this. We could consider fixing the bookmarks/history UI to ensure they open links somewhere other than the popup. The fact that a bunch of the options "take effect somewhere else" is still valuable, especially if no other windows are open anymore. If we remove the button, the user has no obvious way to reopen a "normal" window on Linux/Windows.