Firefox tabs-inspired taskbar

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Gulpen
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 1:31 pm

Firefox tabs-inspired taskbar

Post by Gulpen »

Dear community,

I want to share some of my ideas about my ideal minimalist interface which, I hope, can find their way into LXDE, because I use and love Lubuntu very much.

My main suggestion: make the taskbar behave more like the Firefox tabs bar.Among others, this allows you to clean up the buttons on application windows. I think especially browsers have made important progress in terms of usability and minimalism - we should try to copy good developments into general UI.

1. Apps can be fixed in your taskbar, "application launch bar". This is similar to pinning a tab in Firefox.

2. On the window we now have a close button: this can be removed by replacing it with a close button on the app in the taskbar - like is done in Firefox.

3. Minimalisation can be done with a click on the app/tab which is already open. Hence, the button can be removed from windows' title bar.

4. Maximalisation is the only button which is left. Thus the button can be removed and a general double click on the title bar is the only that needs to remain. But I'm not fully satisfied with this solution. I prefer not requiering double-clicking. Some solution may be inspired by the ability to drag and drop tabs in Firefox. Or in the difference between clicking on a application and clicking on a tab.

5. The 'plus' (Firefox: new tab) button can get some of the 'start menu' functionality. That is, settings, updates, close, new session (logout), etc.

Finally (6), a random idea, visually the taskbar only represents whether a window is minimalised (it gets shaded and the square brackets). Much more interesting to me is which windows I used most recently. That is also why I have to use alt+tab so often because this allows me to switch to the most recent windows - i.e. I cannot easily find the most recent used windows in the taskbar. This may visually be represented by using different shades of colour to indicate in the launch bar how recent an application was used.

I hope these thoughts are useful additions. these are some useful ideas. I added a very ugly GIMPshop sketch, just to get my point across.

With warm regards,
Gulpen
Attachments
Firefox bars.png
Very ugly Firefox tabs-inspired taskbar sketch.
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maces
Posts: 503
Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:04 pm
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Re: Firefox tabs-inspired taskbar

Post by maces »

Hi

That's sounding very cool, you could write a feature request for that.

maces
Gulpen
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 1:31 pm

Re: Firefox tabs-inspired taskbar

Post by Gulpen »

Submitted as two Feature Requests:
3415139
3415141
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