Hey, Thanks for your comments - most of those are definitely things which have been on my mind and it's great you bought them up.
This work came out of an effort to try and utilise the space better on mobile devices; we felt that the current list implementation used the space poorly and looked dated, especially on larger phones, and also introduced multiple UIs over different form factors which was a poor user experience. The tablet version of Fennec uses the same grid layout and has been on production for quite a while now, so moving mobile over to this was a good logical step. Reaching parity across form factors is an important step for a number of reasons (a common unified look within Fennec, reducing code complexity, consistency; you can see antlams slides on this work here: https://people.mozilla.org/~alam/Presentations/mob_tabstray_v2_2015.pdf). We're in a good position to look forward to further improving the tabs tray which will now be easier and faster because of this work. We're considering better swipe interactions, the possibility of pinning tabs to the tab tray, work around gestures and grouping etc. Personally I would like to now replace the GridView used in the tabs tray with a more flexible component called a RecyclerView which will then allow us to define layouts on the fly based on device specification and possibly user choice. There's a lot more work coming up to make this area of the UI better - this work is a necessary step to opening up those possibilities With that said, I realise I've not answered your questions and I don't have concrete answers currently, but I'd love to discuss to see what we can come up with to solve them. Changing a fundamental piece of the UI is never going to be risk free, but I don't see any of the issues you've mentioned as being potential blockers. A few thoughts on your points: 1, The current implementation certainly seems to show too little of a page title to be much use, but then I wonder exactly how much of the title we should show? The page title and thumbnail were only ever meant to serve as a mental nudge as to what's there. The grid view makes it easier to see more tabs you have open at any point and although the thumbnails are slightly smaller, we've changed the aspect ratio so you actually get to see more than just the header of the page. Whilst there are certain situations which will become slightly more tricky (many pages with the same titles and very similar thumbnails), in the vast majority of cases this should make navigating and switching tabs a lot faster with less scrolling involved. The current implementation of the thumbnail sizes isn't set in stone, and because of the various device form factors, there's going to be a bit of tinkering to be done before we're done. if you can send me screenshots as described in the first post I can take a look and see if I can improve it. With that in mind, I'm open to playing about with the UI for the tabs - maybe we could show two lines of title text and see if that feels better? 2 & 3, We have plans on making swipe to close better - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1178794 4, Good point - having spoken to antlam, we're happy to remove the X, but only after we improve the swipe interaction. We can do something about the hit size on the X though - I think we already increase it a bit, perhaps the hit area needs to be made bigger again? As a side note, the points you raise could equally apply to the tablet UI - I'd be interested to hear you thoughts on that too. M On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 5:23 PM, James Willcox <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Martyn, > > Thanks for all the work you've done on the tabs tray. Unfortunately I'm > not a big fan of the changes. Some of the problems I have: > > 1) Most page titles are truncated now, which makes it very difficult to > switch tabs if you have several open to the same website (Amazon, for > instance). The thumbnails are too similar. > 2) Swiping away in a grid is weird. In a stacked list it makes more sense, > with the analogy being crossing off a todo item. > 3) Before, if I had a bunch of tabs open that I wanted to close, I could > easily swipe them all away. Maybe it's just me, but that seems harder now. > 4) Who is using the 'X' to close a tab? That thing is tiny. When I've > tried to use it, I fat-fingered the tab and ended up selecting it instead. > > Do you think we have solutions to any of these? > > James > > On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 3:07 AM, Martyn Haigh <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Alright - the tabs tray changes have finally landed and are available to >> check out on nightly. >> >> As before - comments and feedback are gratefully welcomed. >> >> Martyn >> >> On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Martyn Haigh <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hey mobile-foxers, >>> >>> I've just landed the last of a series of patches which bring some >>> changes to the mobile tabs tray. These changes include: >>> >>> - 1161638: Remove the chrome at the bottom of the screen in the Tabs >>> Tray >>> - 1164723: Inherit from Tablet UI on Mobile UI (aka compact tabs) >>> - 1193374: Remove tab panel preview dimension dependency from >>> TopSites >>> - 1193745: Implement the tablet tabs tray grid view on mobile >>> >>> This brings about a unification of the visual styles for the tabs tray >>> between tablet and mobile and also gives us a lot of flexibility around how >>> tab previews are displayed, paving the way for some seriously funky UI >>> possibilities in the future. >>> >>> I'm reaching out to you to keep an eye on the tabs tray look and feel >>> over the next few weeks so we can hammer out any possible issues with it >>> before it lands in Aurora (21st Sep). Possible issues I'm looking for are >>> tab previews in the tabs tray looking too big or too small for a given >>> screen size and pixel density. I've tested on all the devices I have at >>> home ( >>> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6c2twk2o08rscrs/AADeKQQLEOYeweOShTkkYbjQa?dl=0) >>> but there will probably be some device configs which I've not accounted >>> for. >>> >>> If something does look wonky, please take screenshots in both landscape >>> and portrait and also send me a screenshot of this application >>> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sturnus.screeninfo&hl=en >>> making sure to scroll the app page down a little to include all of the >>> "Default Display Metrics" and "Default Display (Physical)" sections. >>> Create a bug assigned to me with all three of those images attached and >>> I'll check em out. >>> >>> Going forwards we'll probably want to think of a way to automagically >>> determine the tab dimensions based on the device config at runtime by >>> implementing a RecyclerView instead of the fragile GridView we currently >>> have in place. Patches welcome. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> Martyn >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> mobile-firefox-dev mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev >> >> >
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