906426 - Feature Request: Replace Dynamic Toolbar with Fading Action Bar

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, enhancement)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130817030228

Steps to reproduce:

No matter how you look at it, the Dynamic Toolbar is terrible UX. It requires that a user scrolls up a bit in order to find the action bar and invoke simple actions. Fennec's implementation of the Dynamic Toolbar is by and far the worst or those that have thus far implemented it but I personally don't believe it makes for a good user experience no matter how you look at it. Though there are many much more educated people than I that can attest to that and make a far better argument. Sharing, switching tabs are primary actions and I believe we can leverage some additional users by baulking the browser trend and maintaining their presence.

I'd like us to fix this and instead switch to a Fading Action Bar (https://github.com/ManuelPeinado/FadingActionBar). It removes the distractions of the action bar while maintaining usability and consistency with the other apps on the platform.

I believe we could use the existing graphics simply with a contrasting border to maintain visibility even when faded and could remove the text from the Fading Action Bar with the same logic in which we hide the Dynamic Toolbar and even fade the icons, the contrast should keep them available while non-distracting.

For users that really want the Dynamic Toolbar back I believe we should create an extension that for that functionality, as it was in fact done before. The current trend at Mozilla is to cater to the average user and assume they're stupid, replacing the Dynamic Toolbar with the Fading Toolbar does that, by ensuring that we maintain consistency and are easy to use.

If you compare a browser to an app that does use and possibly require a Dynamic Toolbar like a reading app (i.e. Kindle for Android), the use case is nowhere near what ours is. Kindle has no vertical scrolling or clickable elements in page and the toolbar appears beyond touching the screen. It's a completely different UX to that of a browser, especially a modern browser whereby the user is expected to interact with the page.

One of the big things about Fennec as a third-party app is that if we're going to do things, we need to do them better than the opposition, so that's Chrome with the marketing and pre-installations, Dolphin and now Opera with Webkit and so assured site compatibility (admittedly out of our control), but what we can do is make sure we have the best user experience for our users and I believe the Fading Action Bar would be a fundamentally superior user experience for Firefox users, but new and old, aged and young.

Comment 1

[Massimiliano Caniparoli]

I never noticed it was working that way until FF 32: previously I was using Fullscreen extension.
At the moment, I find it really annoying when using sites like facebook mobile, where the top header is the same height than FF toolbar.
Even worse, when a site has fluid layout or fixed-positioned elements, like full screen images, you can't scroll, hence the toolbar NEVER disappears (I may rpeort examples).
I don't know if Paul's solution would be the best one, but I full agree with him.
At the moment, I disabled the dynamic toolbar in my Samsung Ace 2.

Comment 2

[Massimiliano Caniparoli]

I forgot the most important thing for which I came here: with dynamic toolbar active, in many sites my taps were detected some pixels (I guess toolbar height-pixels) above the actual position, and so were the clicks.
It was annoying enough for inducing a user to uninstall Firefox.
I didn't notice the issue with dynamic toolbar off.

Comment 3

[Massimiliano Caniparoli]

Many of my troubles don't still happen.

Comment 4

[miralobontiu]

Hi,

Should this bug still be opened?

Thanks!

Comment 5

[Paul [pwd]]

Given that the UX team didn't even engage in the conversation, I believe it should be marked as invalid.