496460 - show throbber in right-hand corner when "always show tabs" is turned off

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 470395

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Matěj Cepl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; cs-CZ; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090427 Fedora/3.5-0.20.beta4.fc11 Firefox/3.5b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; cs-CZ; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090427 Fedora/3.5-0.20.beta4.fc11 Firefox/3.5b4

(originally filed as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502850)

After updating to F11, my firefox window no longer had the "activity indicator" / spinner / throbber / progress thingy icon at the right end of the menubar that shows when network activity is happening, which makes it difficult to tell what Firefox is doing.

I created a clean profile to make sure that this wasn't just a problem with upgrading existing ff3 profiles, and the new profile had the problem too.

You can fix this by hand with View->Toolbars->Customize, so the code is all still there and working, it's just that the default layout is broken or something.  

---

Ah, I see what's happened. 3.5 defaults to "Always show the tab bar", and so
you always get a spinner per-tab in the tab bar and so you don't need a global
spinner in the menu bar, and so presumably the Powers That Be removed it
because it was redundant. But now if you turn off "Always show the tab bar"
(which I did, because I was used to the old way), you don't get any spinner at
all...

Maybe the menubar spinner should appear if you turn off "Always show the tab
bar"? Or else "Always show the tab bar" should be removed from the prefs
dialog.  


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.turn off "Always show the tab bar"
2.load a page
3.
Actual Results:  
even with this option switched off, no spinner

Expected Results:  
when this option is switched off, the original spinner should appear again

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

uhh, you are meaning the throbber in the right-hand corner? yes, it is now on the tab itself in 3.5. I think we assumed if someone wanted to not show the tab bar all the time (it means a loss of some functionality, and would require some to make the change), they could probably add the throbber back if they wanted it.

Comment 2

[Steevithak]

I just installed Fedora 11 which includes Firefox 3.5b4 and the lack of a throbber (spinner or whatever you call it) is driving me crazy. I don't use tabs and didn't want to waste the space at the top just to show one tab so I turned it off in the config. But now there is no throbber, making it difficult to tell when pages are loading. Hopefully this isn't an attempt at "social engineering" to make us all use tabs! :)

I agree with the original poster, if tabs are turned off the traditional spinner on the upper right should reappear.

Comment 4

[iworms]

I found an easy fix:

Go to "View" --> "Toolbars" --> "Customize..."

You should see an "Activity Indicator". Drag it to where you want it to be (typically the upper right corner, right below the Windows "X" button).

Comment 5

[Steevithak]

iworms, two problems: 1) at least on my Firefox 3.5.1, this simply doesn't work, no matter where you attempt to put the throbber it moves to the left portion of the bar near the "help" menu, which is almost as bad as not having it and 2) a typical user is never going to realize they have to manually install the throbber, they'll just assume it's gone and complain about. Some type of an activity indicator should be present on the GUI by default, even in non-tab mode.

Comment 6

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

R. Steven, to get it to stay on the right, you need to put a spacer between the help menu and the throbber.