415949 - Remove tab progress spinners

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, defect)

Description

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

The tab progress spinners continue to be buggy, and we don't have enough time to fix them properly.

See bug 406402, bug 407225, bug 408961, and bug 413935.  I've also seen a (very mild, compared to the 2004 "new tabs" custom builds with spinners enabled) few cases of page tearing when scrolling when a spinner is spinning.

Comment 1

[Stuart Morgan]

Attachment: v1

This is a minimal replacement of the spinners with a static image. This assumes that we will fix and re-enable spinners at some point when we have more time to try to beat them into submission (if we don't believe that, I can rip things all the way out and eliminate the need for an extra view in each tab altogether).

We should have a few people play with these and see if anyone besides me thinks it's a good idea to use a static loading image vs. doing nothing.

Comment 2

[Stuart Morgan]

Attachment: possible image

Here's a loading indicator I was playing with; other suggestions are very welcome.

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Comment on attachment 302521 [details] [diff] [review]
v1

Looks good, seems to work well and resolve the known bugs.  I'm not sure I noticed much speedup, but then again I haven't tracked down hard numbers on that to begin with :(

Comment 4

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #1)

> This is a minimal replacement of the spinners with a static image. This assumes
> that we will fix and re-enable spinners at some point when we have more time to
> try to beat them into submission (if we don't believe that, I can rip things
> all the way out and eliminate the need for an extra view in each tab
> altogether).

I'd think we'd all like to do it, if only for parity with Safari and Firefox.  At least I would.

> We should have a few people play with these and see if anyone besides me thinks
> it's a good idea to use a static loading image vs. doing nothing.

For those of us who've "gotten used" to the spinners, I think some sort of loading image will be a less jarring adjustment.

(In reply to comment #2)
> Here's a loading indicator I was playing with; other suggestions are very
> welcome.

This seemed a little too much like the normal globe to me as I was playing with it; if we go with something like this, I think it will need to be more transparent.

Any reason you didn't just go with a single frame from the spinner (besides the difficulty in getting at it)?

Comment 5

[Stuart Morgan]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Any reason you didn't just go with a single frame from the spinner (besides the
> difficulty in getting at it)?

I considered it, but my since it's very unusual for them to show when they aren't animating I strongly suspect that having a static version would make people feel that something was wrong ("Camino freezes when it loads tabs!").

Comment 6

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 302521 [details] [diff] [review]
v1

sr=pink

sigh.

Comment 7

[Stuart Morgan]

Landed on trunk and MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH, with a more-rapidly-fading version of the globe icon. We can tweak it further in follow-ups if necessary.

I'll fix up and re-open the bug to re-enable the spinners.