907282 - Dynamic toolbar reduces usability on tablets/large screen devices.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 902456

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[miroslav]

Attachment: Mockup of the always visible tab button.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130730113002

Steps to reproduce:

Most of the other tablet browsers are one, sometimes two clicks away to switch between tabs. With the dynamic toolbar I usually have to swipe up thus adding another step. This usability/screen estate trade-off is quite OK on small screen mobile phones, but not so great on tablets/phablets. 


Actual results:

To switch between the tabs, most of the time I have to swipe up first, then click the tabs button to reveal tabs and finally click the tab to switch. This is not only one step more from the previous behavior, but also quite inconsistent as sometimes the toolbar is already visible, sometimes it isn't. 


Expected results:

As it looks like adding an settings option to enable/disable toolbar isn't going to happen (see bug #906674) we should probably look for some other options to resolve the usability issue. 

One of the solutions could be to hide the toolbar only on smaller screens where it makes sense. 

Other that I could think of is leaving the tabs button always visible and only hiding the rest of the toolbar. Optionally leaving some sort of "shadow" (gradient) on top of the entire screen to prevent possible bug #888690. See the attached mockup.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

We already have a bug on