Location bar-with-titles first impressions
Benjamin Smedberg
first-impressions... please don't hold me to my words in a week as I get
used to it ;-)
* It's definitely easier to use in the case where I don't recognize a URL
but I do recognize a page title
* It's large... it feels large and clunky for some reason
* The fact that the font size is larger for the titles than the URLs feels
weird... can't they be the same size?
* The green feels really weird. links are normally blue, right? I happen to
like green, but still, something other than blue (URLs) or black (text)
feels strange.
* I like knowing what matched, though it feels a little busy...
--BDS
Adam Kowalczyk
> I just noticed the location bar with titles, and I'm trying to give
> first-impressions... please don't hold me to my words in a week as I get
> used to it ;-)
>
> * It's definitely easier to use in the case where I don't recognize a URL
> but I do recognize a page title
>
> * It's large... it feels large and clunky for some reason
>
> * The fact that the font size is larger for the titles than the URLs feels
> weird... can't they be the same size?
I agree, I think that the increased font size is probably one the
reasons why it all feels a little clunky and overwhelming.
>
> * The green feels really weird. links are normally blue, right? I happen to
> like green, but still, something other than blue (URLs) or black (text)
> feels strange.
*Links* are blue but these are not actual, clickable links. These are
more like additional descriptions under page titles. I am guessing that
it was inspired by web search engines, which use the same kind of layout
and coloring in the results.
- Adam
Marco Bonardo
> *Links* are blue but these are not actual, clickable links. These are
> more like additional descriptions under page titles. I am guessing that
> it was inspired by web search engines, which use the same kind of layout
> and coloring in the results.
Yes it was inspired by search engines style... but i still think that a
light blue would look better on Windows UI (that is mostly blue based),
also the entries are clickable so they are "somehow" links, however the
default blue link colour would be worst than green!
Greg K Nicholson
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 17:11 -0500, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> * The green feels really weird. links are normally blue, right? I
> happen to
> like green, but still, something other than blue (URLs) or black (text)
> feels strange.
Visited links are *purple* by default. But I think it would be better to
use the colours chosen in Preferences → Contents → Fonts & Colours →
Colours.
sayrer
>
> * It's definitely easier to use in the case where I don't recognize a URL
> but I do recognize a page title
Yeah, there are situations where it is much easier to use and much
slicker.
> * It's large... it feels large and clunky for some reason
I think it's a mixed bag. Part of the problem is that it's pretty slow
right now. It's also not very efficient with space. With a maximized
window on my laptop, I almost always have large areas of whitespace in
the dropdown, especially on the right.
On the plus side, it's important to remember that the current drop
down is nothing nice. The new design is much cleaner, but if we're
going for that effect, it must be perfect. For example, the favicons
are much less hokey with some whitespace around them in the new
design, but they aren't aligned with the favicon in the location bar.
> * The fact that the font size is larger for the titles than the URLs feels
> weird... can't they be the same size?
>
> * I like knowing what matched, though it feels a little busy...
Yeah, I agree it could be more subtle. It's also great for finding
bugs in our matcher. I don't think letting 'p' match 'http' is very
useful. ;)
- Rob
Foteos Macrides
>I just noticed the location bar with titles, and I'm trying to give
> first-impressions...
> * It's large... it feels large and clunky for some reason
>
> * The fact that the font size is larger for the titles than
> the URLs feels weird... can't they be the same size?
I have not yet seen any indication of responsiveness to this complaint, here
or in the relevant bugs -- where the bold and excessively large fonts for
the titles have been characterized as "in your face" shouting which
interferes with the original and for many (certainly for me :<) still
important use of the location bar dropdown to display and enable rapid
selections from a list of those URLs which have been actively chosen via
typing or copy-and-pastes into the location bar. This is fundamentally
different (but need not be mutually exclusive) from a "history and
bookmarks" search via the location bar dropdown.
In conjunction with that change in formatting of the dropdown, the trunk
code added:
browser.urlbar.richResults
to about:config which as far as I can tell restores the horizontal,
single-and-compact-line display of the URLs and titles as in Fx3.0beta1, but
with the new search and revolving buffer (most recent URL/title selection
moves to the top) features retained. So I changed that to false from its
default of true, and didn't worry about this matter (instead simply assuming
that those who can't tolerate the "in your face" shouting of titles in the
new, default formatting would eventually be respected :<).
But this week Bug #407836 - remove support for browser.urlbar.richResults
was filed. Sigh...
Instead, two things are needed (IMHO):
1. For the vertically-stacked displays of the titles and URLs, use the
same, smaller-size font for the titles as for the URLs, with black versus
green, respectively, but no bolding of the titles, and with their shortcut
icons vertically spanning the two rows rather than restricted to the title
row and thus requiring a larger line-height for it.
2. Add a simple UI for quickly and easily switching between the
vertically-stacked versus horizontal displays, without need for general
users to modify about:config or "write an extension" themselves.
Fote
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