603659 - activity indicator throbber in the toolbar should match the tab throbber

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Attachment: mismatched activity indicators

Bug 602964 added new activity indicator throbbers to tabs, and I think we should change the activity indicator in the toolbar to match.

Comment 1

[Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11]

Also where your at it, the throbber is in the update panel is still a circle of dots, probably should be changed as well.

Comment 2

[Bill Lancashire]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Created attachment 482572 [details]
> mismatched activity indicators
> 
> Bug 602964 added new activity indicator throbbers to tabs, and I think we
> should change the activity indicator in the toolbar to match.

Yes definitely.  Apart from matching the interface, it will be useful for those
who never display the 'tabs'.

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

I do agree with the notion that the activity throbber for the toolbar should match the others, however the throbber toolbar item is a vestigial structure from browsers long since past. I think it'd be simpler and better to just remove this old throbber option from the toolbar palette altogether and relegate such functionality to an addon for anyone who really still wants it.

As to showing a loading indicator when there's no tab bar, that's bug 603594.

Comment 4

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I do agree with the notion that the activity throbber for the toolbar should
> match the others, however the throbber toolbar item is a vestigial structure
> from browsers long since past. I think it'd be simpler and better to just
> remove this old throbber option from the toolbar palette altogether and
> relegate such functionality to an addon for anyone who really still wants it.

Getting ride of the throbber toolbar item sounds like a good idea to me. It seems pretty redundant if there's already throbber on the tab (this is assuming bug 603594 will ensure that a throbber shows somewhere when there are no tabs).

Comment 5

[[not reading bugmail]]

I also saw it in submit crashes dialog so it exists for more than one reason like tabs.

Comment 6

[Dave Garrett]

The throbber image itself shouldn't go anywhere. It's used in plenty of places, including extensions. We're just talking about the toolbar item here.

Comment 7

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Not sure that it's worth our time to kill the toolbar item at this point in the cycle. Likely to cause fury and strife, and there's no real need to do it that I can see.

Margaret: can't we just rebind it to use the same new throbber underpinings that are used on tabs?

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Not sure that it's worth our time to kill the toolbar item at this point in the
> cycle. Likely to cause fury and strife, and there's no real need to do it that
> I can see.

That's a good point.

> Margaret: can't we just rebind it to use the same new throbber underpinings
> that are used on tabs?

Yes, it should be pretty easy. We just need to modify XULBrowserWindow.onProgressChange and XULBrowserWindow.onStateChange (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/browser.js#3996) to do the same things as the tab progress listeners (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/tabbrowser.xml#369). We'd also need to adjust the appropriate #navigator-throbber styles in the theme CSS.

Comment 9

[Norman Paschke]

Search for updates in the about dialog uses the "old" throbber, too. Would be nice if this could be changed as well.

Comment 10

[Fritz]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Search for updates in the about dialog uses the "old" throbber, too. Would be
> nice if this could be changed as well.

Normally we're asked to create bugs for each instance--I created bug 611660 for that and made it depend on this.

Comment 11

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

I'll take a stab at this bug.

Comment 12

[Dave Garrett]

Thanks Jared, but I have to ask: do we still want to do this? There didn't seem to be much disagreement on the possibility of just removing the toolbar item (not the image), just not at that time (close to the Firefox 4 release). What about ditching it for Firefox 7? It'd make things simpler and remove a redundant rarely used minor feature.

Comment 13

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

If we want to pursue fixing this bug, we will need another graphic that describes that the page has finished loading.

The current tab throbber implementation does not require this graphic because it is replaced with the favicon.

Comment 14

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

shorlander - any thoughts on what we should do here? OS X is (probably) easy, since the inactive state is just blank, but for Windows/Linux I'm not sure what the inactive state of the swirly new throbber would be.

I suppose the other alternative is to just kill the throbber-in-toolbar.

Comment 15

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Jared - do you think this should still be marked as a [good first bug]? Given the amount of disagreement over what to do and whether anything needs doing, maybe it would be best as either not a good first, or as a mentored bug.

Comment 16

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Thanks for the ping Liz. We can close this bug out, as bug 873518 is removing the toolbar item.