468223 - URL dropdown menu should be styled after OS X context menus.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[Luke]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

The current style of the url dropdown menu does not fit the Mac interface.  The menu should be style after current context menus.  These menus are simple like the dropdown menu, and also support the line separators.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

this is a theme question.

Comment 2

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Stephen, Alex, what do you think about this?
The Camino guys are currently restyling their menu, too: http://wiki.caminobrowser.org/Development:Summer_of_Code_2009

Comment 3

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

The location bar results UI design is a very specific interface for a very specific interaction, so a lot of thought has gone into font sizes, using bold, colors, (and in the future kerning so text doesn't shift as you continue to match).  While I'm really all for OS consistency, sometimes we have to break conventions to solve very specific problems and streamline particular interactions.

The camino mockups don't effectively support ranking and adaptive learning (history and bookmarks results are not mixed), it doesn't seem to support displaying the matched section of text, and the results are not as easy to quickly visually scan in less than a second (using a larger font, use of color that allows the user to lock into a particular data type during their visual scan, more details here: http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/daf/cogSciColorSelect.png).

So overall I think styling our UI after contextual menus purely because that makes it feel more OSXy in this case is naive.

Comment 4

[Luke]

We can simply replace the white background panel with one styled after the OS X menus.  This would increase theme consistency and allow the current url color system to be maintained.  Then we can decide where to go from there.

Comment 5

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>We can simply replace the white background panel with one styled after the OS X
>menus.  This would increase theme consistency and allow the current url color
>system to be maintained.

yeah, minor adjustments like that wouldn't have a significant impact to the way users interact with the interface, and could help us feel a little more in the spirit of being native (even if we aren't literally native).