949384 - Always display url bar, even in popups

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect)

Description

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

SeaMonkey should always display an url bar, even in popup windows. There are good reasons for this:
1. User is able to see what address got opened in an popup
2. Click-to-play plugins might, depending on the website, only get activated via the icon in the url bar. This can for example happen when a plugin object is hidden by a website, for example when using a Flash audio stream or some website that uses a Java plugin object in the the background to launch a new Java UI window (these are real world examples that I've encountered). So without an URL bar, the user cannot activate those plugin objects.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

+1, that's annoying me every time a website does that, and assuming that it's a JavaScript function, maybe make that available in the Advanced > Scripts & Plugins preference (similar to hiding the status bar).

Comment 2

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Hm, what about small popups due to (e.g.) the JS "alert" function? Adding an URL bar to them doesn't sound very realistic to me.

Comment 3

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

The URL bar adds additional space to the popup. Check out how it looks in Firefox (if you have an example in mind), they do that.

Comment 4

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Frank Wein [:mcsmurf] from comment #3)
> The URL bar adds additional space to the popup. Check out how it looks in
> Firefox (if you have an example in mind), they do that.

Oh, yeah?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0
20131213030203
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8b5875dc7e31

I'll attach in a minute a snapshot showing its popup (with no URL bar).

Comment 5

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Attachment: screenshot from Firefox

No URL bar… unless you regard the whole Fx window (not just the rectangle in the middle) as being the popup

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Attachment: the same popup, as seen in SeaMonkey 2.24a1

For comparison, here's the SeaMonkey version, as gotten from the same webpage viewed in:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 SeaMonkey/2.24a1 ID:20130919003001 c-c:1ea1fc3586db m-c:803189f35921

Comment 7

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

That's no popup in the sense of this bug here, that's a JavaScript alert(...).

Comment 8

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Frank Wein [:mcsmurf] from comment #7)
> That's no popup in the sense of this bug here, that's a JavaScript
> alert(...).

So what are popups "in the sense of this bug"? And why didn't you tell me (after comment #2) that this bug wasn't about Javascript alert() popups but about some other kind of popup?

Comment 9

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Because I overlooked at the JS alert part in your comment :) (maybe because I so far never saw anyone calling this a popup in the browser context). A popup is a new browser windows opened by a website, possibly after the user clicks a link or a button. Popup windows can have reduced or no browser GUI.

Comment 10

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Frank Wein [:mcsmurf] from comment #9)
> Because I overlooked at the JS alert part in your comment :) (maybe because
> I so far never saw anyone calling this a popup in the browser context). A
> popup is a new browser windows opened by a website, possibly after the user
> clicks a link or a button. Popup windows can have reduced or no browser GUI.

Hm, okay. When I came to GUIs (and even, before that, curses-like text UIs for MS-DOS applications e.g. Turbo C), a popup was something which popped up as a rectangular area, usually somewhere in the middle of the screen. What we call today a context menu would be called a popup menu. Any dialog (including alerts) could also be called a popup. I suppose the terminology has evolved in the years since then, or that I unwittingly moved progressively from one data-processing context into another with a different "house language".

About "without a URL bar…" in comment #0, I might mention that I see on some sites a notification bar between chrome and content, saying "Would you like to activate the plugins on this page? [ Activate plugins ] [ Don't activate ] [_] Remember for this website". However I have browser.doorhanger.enabled set to false, which is not the default. So maybe an alternate possibility would be to display a notification bar whenever the (popup) window doesn't have the required chrome elements for a doorhanger (or if they are hidden or otherwise inaccessible)?