designoir
… On extensions and jetpacks
Learning / stealing from IE and Chrome: Saving screen real estate
Mittwoch, 23. Dez ’09Since I spend most of my online time in front of a netbook, saving screen real estate has become a lot more important to me. Gaining or losing 50px vertically has immediate implications on the usability of a number of websites that I frequent. In this regard, Firefox with its default configuration isn’t quite the product that I need it to be. At the same time, the default configuration makes sense to me, as I regularly use most of what it provides. So this isn’t just about cruft removal. I want the whole package for half the price.
In this post, I will describe how I got there:
The menu bar. I use it every day, but not so often that I need to see it all the time. So I just implemented what IE does. Starting with Firefox 3.6, every Windows user will be able to hide the menu bar in Firefox and show it temporarily with the Alt key.
The bookmarks toolbar is my only place for bookmarks. The bookmarks menu hasn’t grown on me, although I’m not sure why. I definitely don’t and won’t use the clunky bookmarks sidebar or the Library to access a particular bookmark. So the toolbar it is. But like the menu bar, I neither need nor want it to occupy space permanently. And as with the menu bar, the solution turned out to be simple. I took the bookmarks button that Firefox provides in the toolbar customization palette and made it show/hide the bookmark toolbar rather than the sidebar. You can get the extension for this here.
The status bar is trickier. I mostly need it for exposing link targets (since the progress bar is redundant). I tried to stop depending on that, but it didn’t work. I need the URLs to be displayed, even if I won’t read them out most of the time. Existing solutions for Firefox show the status bar temporarily or display link targets in the location bar, both of which didn’t feel ideal to me. It took me months to figure this out, but I think Chrome gets this right: It displays the URL in a small panel in a bottom corner of the browser window. This allows me to look there when I need it and ignore it otherwise. Just what I need. So I implemented something similar for Firefox. You can get the extension here.
19 Antworten auf Learning / stealing from IE and Chrome: Saving screen real estate
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xeen meint 23.12.2009, 11:48:19:
Then again, you could still install Vimperator. Yeah, it’s keyboard only but that’s actually a plus from my point of view: mouse inputs on notebooks are slow and being able to navigate using the keyboard really improves that. My current setup uses 17px on the left (tab bar with favicons plus 1px border) and 32px (or so) at the bottom for the default Vimperator GUI (and no scrollbars whatsoever). It has a steep learning curve, but I’ve seen non-programmer people using it so it’s not that hard.
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Pino meint 23.12.2009, 11:56:48:
I like the statusbar addon you made. I wonder why it shows the url in the right in stead of the left though?
Also the aligning doesn’t function properly on large resolution (1920 wide); it doesn’t show all the way to the right, but slightly more to the left, leaving space on the right. -
Alfred Kayser meint 23.12.2009, 12:16:21:
Both work nicely! Also with my themes of course.
P.s., the bookmark toolbar and the history toolbar can have now both have the ‘checked’ status at the same time (as they no longer share the sidebar for this).
Can the ‘download’ toolbarbutton also be changed to be ‘checked’ when the download window is open, and when unchecked, close the download window, so that it operates in the same way as bookmarks and history?P.s., Submitted bug 536531 for this on bugzilla.
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Funtomas meint 23.12.2009, 12:54:05:
Grand Theft Design ;-) Based on your acknowledgment “I use it every day, but not so often that I need to see it all the time”, I guess the next phase of chrome UI minimizing will be to get rid of the toolbars altogether. Instead, they’ll slide in when approaching screen borders with your mouse, much the same way Fennec does it. No more F11.
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eyaler meint 23.12.2009, 13:22:03:
i use the url tooltip extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12015
for exposing target urls -
Livio meint 23.12.2009, 13:31:22:
Try URL Tooltip instead of Fission and then minimize tooltip delay – also a nice combination ;) .
Using Hide Caption you can get even more space if you want ;) .
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dao meint 23.12.2009, 14:01:29:
I thought about displaying the URL in a tooltip near the mouse. Opera does this. I think it’s not quite what I want in terms of allowing me to ignore the thing when I don’t need to look at the URL.
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Note, the bookmark switch doesn’t seem to work in fullscreen mode.
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Yeah, full-screen mode forcefully hides all toolbars except for the navigation toolbar. I guess I could override this.
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Pete meint 23.12.2009, 14:10:46:
What I do not understand is why don’t you simply scroll the UI with the content and show it when the cursor is closer than about 50px to the top. that way, you have all the space you need.
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Pete, sure, that would be the optimum in terms of saving space, and we do it in full-screen mode. But I’m afraid it would hurt usability outside of full-screen mode, as I interact quite often with the tab bar, toolbar buttons and the location bar. Having the primary UI slide up and down all the time sounds like it would be annoying.
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Ben meint 23.12.2009, 16:39:58:
@11 — That’s my biggest concern with these sorts of hiding-the-UI approaches, and it’s IMHO the key thing the Office Ribbon gets right: give us N pixels of vertical space, and we promise to never use more than that to show you UI. Having the web page bounce up and down (or reflow, if showing a new UI item causes a scrollbar to appear) is really annoying.
There’s something modal about interactions with the menu bar, bookmark toolbar, or address bar: you only need one of them at a time. So rather than have a button on the menubar that toggles the visibility of the bookmark bar, or have the menu bar temporarily appear with the Alt key, I’d rather have one bar’s worth of pixels be used modally for each of the three usages. When you press Alt, the menubar slides in to overlap the address bar (like in OS X sheets). When you press your bookmarks button, the bookmarks bar slides in to overlap the address bar.
Chrome’s approach to the status bar, by contrast, gets this exactly right: it’s a floating window that appears when you need it and cannot cause a reflow or bounce of document content.
Granted, that’s a bit more of a UI change than these toggles are, and might take more engineering to make ‘em work… :)
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Ben, ribbon would cost me about a third of the space that I’ve just gained, wouldn’t it? I’m not sure that’s a price I’d want to pay. It’s true that pressing Alt moves the page down, and I’m not fond of that. But it hasn’t really annoyed me over the last few months, as I don’t use the menu bar nearly as often as I use the tab bar or the navigation toolbar.
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Dan meint 23.12.2009, 17:49:31:
Are those two extensions things that are likely to make it into Firefox? Both the bookmarks toolbar and the status bar are things that don’t need to be shown 100% of the time.
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Some solution for the statusbar will make it into Firefox, as we want to hide it by default. We’ll see some changes to the Places UI, but I don’t know how this will affect the bookmarks toolbar.
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Asa Dotzler meint 02.01.2010, 23:30:07:
Dao, how difficult would it be to change the box shadow on the tooltip? Ideally, I think, it wouldn’t have a drop shadow and the border would be a tad darker. Right now it is difficult to see on a light background on poor-contrast screens.
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New version looks awesome!!
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is there any kind of delay set on how quickly the tooltip comes up. I notice that if I mouse over a bunch of nearby links quickly, it never comes up. (test on this page by mousing up the column of names commenting across the “meint:” link and notice that if you move quickly, the tooltip never comes up. If you hover over one for longer, then it does show.
This seems nice for not flickering the tooltip if you’re mousing quickly over links, but it’s also kind of slow feeling when you do hover on a link to see where it leads. Ideally, if the mouse pointer was moving fast, the tooltip shouldn’t show but the nanosecond the pointer is stable over a link the tooltip should show. that would get the best of both worlds.
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Yeah, there’s an intended delay. I’ll look into your suggestion.
