Sunday, February 08, 2009

Chromeless browser 2

My second day in a chromeless browser taught me i visually depend on more UI elements that i was aware of.

For instance the throbber. Because there is no statusbar or a locationbar that shows the page loading progress the throbber becomes a crucial element. Lucky for me vimperator gives a messaget when a background tab is opened. This gave me the idea to have a two tone throbber. The darker colour throbber would appear when the current tab loads and the lighter colour throbber would appear when a background tab is loading.

The throbber should be clickable. In the current tab it should stop the page loading. With background tabs it should do the same if only one background tab is loading and open a list of loading background tabs if there are more. There has to be an option to exclude often refreshing pages like passpack.com with one click on.

Another UI element is the download progress of files. I'm using the download statusbar add-on for a long while now and i find i come to depend on it. The add-on has an option to keep downloading in the download manager after the browser is closed but you can't see when a download is finished during the browser session.

The thing i miss the most is the tab overview the tabsbar gives me. So i installed the ctrl-tab add-on which gives an overview of the tabs using the shortcut ctrl-shift-A.

As a power user i want to have access to the url. I could make a ubiquity command for this but i don't know how to put the fetched url in the commandline.

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