Smooth Firefox 13 new tab animation

[Ryrynz]

Looks and feels a lot nicer than 12 with both opening and closing animations, can we get this added at some point?

[megaman]

If they would include those sliding tabs again, I would be grateful, not that they are necessary, though.

[Ryrynz]

Eye candy isn't necessary of course but you can't jump into Chrome and not say.. "Wow those animations are pretty neat, I wouldn't mind some of those in Firefox/Pale Moon"

[satrow]

... you can't jump into Chrome and not say.. "Wow those animations are pretty neat, ...

Uh, no - I'd probably say "WTH are they wasting my CPU cycles on that when I just want to get to a web page".

Like the iPad with the "page turning" animations - stop it, if I wanted to see the corners of a page being lifted I would buy the bloody book!

[megaman]

Eye candy isn't necessary of course but you can't jump into Chrome and not say.. "Wow those animations are pretty neat, I wouldn't mind some of those in Firefox/Pale Moon"

Firefox's team halted the sliding tabs, they were planned for Fx8.
I am only ticked that they have not re-introduced them, not even for the upcoming Fx16 Nightly.

All of this because of add-ons. So, my rant is against them holding back things, many things keep being pushed up.

[Ryrynz]

Uh, no - I'd probably say "WTH are they wasting my CPU cycles on that when I just want to get to a web page".

If everybody thought like that then CPU speed wouldn't really need to be improved for general desktop use and everything would stay looking plain and boring.

I was all keen on my dark grey classic theme with plain black background and no wallpaper back in 1995 but with dual and quad core CPU's with gigs of memory it seems rather silly now days.
The reason why I and other people chose to do this was for performance, nothing else. To desire no animations for no other reason than "All it does it look nice and it uses power so I don't want it" is just being minimalist and we aren't all minimalists. Anyway general consensus is animations are pretty. The animation we're discussing here is hardly CPU intensive and isn't gaudy so don't worry, it's a minor but noticeable improvement.

Like the iPad with the "page turning" animations - stop it, if I wanted to see the corners of a page being lifted I would buy the bloody book!

Heh, yeah I can agree with you on this, it's something I would possibly want to disable. Animations in Chrome are different from this though, personally I prefer animations in a program, but it doesn't hurt to have options.

Firefox's team halted the sliding tabs, they were planned for Fx8.
I am only ticked that they have not re-introduced them, not even for the upcoming Fx16 Nightly.

All of this because of add-ons. So, my rant is against them holding back things, many things keep being pushed up.

I freaking love sliding tabs. Chrome is just so yummy in the user interface department I've actually styled Pale Moon to be somewhat similar. I saw a beautiful mock up of the New Firefox theme coming later this year I'm really holding out for it.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/R/L/326289 ... l/win7.png

I'm a little concerned about development of Firefox too, Chrome might end up demolishing it, but right now it's just too simple for my tastes.

[Moonchild]

OK, before we go off on the "it looks yummy so I must have it" tangent, I have to remind you: Pale Moon is about delivering an efficient browser. I could make all sorts of fancy fly-in, pan-over, flip, turn, roll, slide and whatnot animations in the UI but apart from it being pleasing to people who like eye candy, it serves no purpose.

Think about:

• It's cool when it's new, but after you've seen them 50 times, they are just as "plain" as any other animation
• It slows down the speed with which you can interact with the browser. That isn't a good thing. You want a snappy browser, right? Do you really want to wait-to-click because your animation has to finish?
• CPU cycles can only be used on one thing. If you use them on UI animations, you can't use them on page rendering or loading or scripting or other actually useful functions. Smooth/fluent animations inherently mean a very high redraw/refresh rate. If you can't offload that to the GPU properly, it will slow down operation. Even if you can offload it to the GPU for the actual compositing part, you're still wasting CPU on needless scripts running in the browser UI.
• Argumenting that in the grand scale of things, this will push hardware manufacturers to create faster machines is a really odd view. It's never a good thing to create a slow program on purpose. Besides, the "big players" already take care of progress (or regress, depending on how you look at it) in that respect. There is a difference between "using all resources available" and "wasting resources"

[Ryrynz]

OK, before we go off on the "it looks yummy so I must have it" tangent, I have to remind you: Pale Moon is about delivering an efficient browser.

Yes, yes we know, that's why we're here

I could make all sorts of fancy fly-in, pan-over, flip, turn, roll, slide and whatnot animations in the UI but apart from it being pleasing to people who like eye candy, it serves no purpose.

Well besides looking utterly FABULOUS! Don't we all like a bit of eye candy though? The question is at what point is the trade off for performance not worth it?

It's cool when it's new, but after you've seen them 50 times, they are just as "plain" as any other animation

I think people tend to continue to appreciate things like this rather than grow bored of them.

It slows down the speed with which you can interact with the browser. That isn't a good thing. You want a snappy browser, right? Do you really want to wait-to-click because your animation has to finish?

Yes, yes I do, but isn't Chrome one of the flashest browsers out there? and yet it it's the one of the fastest browsers on earth, I've never once felt lag with it.

CPU cycles can only be used on one thing. If you use them on UI animations, you can't use them on page rendering or loading or scripting or other actually useful functions. Smooth/fluent animations inherently mean a very high redraw/refresh rate. If you can't offload that to the GPU properly, it will slow down operation. Even if you can offload it to the GPU for the actual compositing part, you're still wasting CPU on needless scripts running in the browser UI.

Now that's going to depend entirely on how it's coded right? CPU's are fast enough to deal with basic things like this in a timely manner already, sure it slows things down a little but the trade off is likely going to be in milliseconds.

Argumenting that in the grand scale of things, this will push hardware manufacturers to create faster machines is a really odd view.

I didn't say that exactly, nor do I have that view, hardware will of course get faster due to progression of the technology not by what we do on the desktop. What I said was that if the GUI required the same processing as ten or fifteen years ago we really wouldn't be needing faster PCs to do the web browsing etc that we do these days. What if improvements to the UI provided no discernible performance loss? Have you experienced performance loss with UX? or is it just the style that doesn't sit right with you? Overall user experience is ultimately more important than concerning yourself with "useless" CPU/GPU cycles, there is a limit as to how far one should go though but with so much processing power to spare why not take advantage of some of it? Nobody wants a slow UI, but is there really a possibility of that ever occurring with today's hardware?

It's never a good thing to create a slow program on purpose. Besides, the "big players" already take care of progress (or regress, depending on how you look at it) in that respect. There is a difference between "using all resources available" and "wasting resources"

I haven't seen many plain looking programs winning people over, but I'm in favor of substance over style so you don't really need to bullet point things to think about to me

"Firefox UX" is something Pale Moon will never go for. I'd rather call it quits before I go for that look. We already have a Chrome browser - why would Firefox need to mimic it? Use Chrome if you like it so much

Ah so that IS the UX theme.. I grabbed the UX build and it looked the same as the standard builds strangely, I haven't checked UX out before but I was aware you didn't like it, it's pretty sleek, but what I've got now looks pretty good too.
Guess features and appearance of FF will face off with PM in future builds or perhaps you might change your mind Nothing wrong with mimicking beauty but it's all in the eye of the beholder, of course.

Use Chrome if you like it so much

No thanks, I just like the theme, the browser still needs development as far as configuration goes.

Anyway, I wasn't asking for a duplicate of Chrome, just that smoother tab animation would be lovely, thanks.

[Moonchild]

I beg to differ on your responses but I won't make this a yes/no thread.

I guess it boils down to taste, then.

I think it ranks right up there with "tilt" in its uselessness. If the lack of pointless eye candy is a breaking issue, then people are at all times free to choose a different browser with different priorities. Tabs are already animated and they work well as-is without going overboard on the animations; I also installed chrome in a sandbox VM just to have a quick look and I do not see any difference with the way Pale Moon animates them - so you'll have to explain exactly how this is different.

[Ryrynz]

Pretty much, I can understand the view of the performance trade off to some degree but sometimes people tend to over exaggerate their thoughts on things.

Wasn't tilt found to be fairly useful to some developers? To the general crowd of PM users it was of course completely useless, so was worth removing. I believe my reply was the first post to your comment about removing it

It was FF13 that had the slightly smoother tab opening and closing animations. I haven't tested with the standard theme but with GlassMyFox and my current theme it's noticeable and brings it a little closer to Chrome's tab closing smoothness.

[Moonchild]

By default, Pale Moon uses shorter transition times than Firefox for tab animations. This was done on purpose to prevent waiting for the UI while still animating the tabs. If that's what you're talking about then it's about a design decision I made a long time ago already, that you can override with userChrome.css if you really want to.

This should do the trick (not tested):

Code: Select all

.tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned]) {
  -moz-transition: min-width 200ms ease-out,
                   max-width 250ms ease-out,
                   opacity 100ms ease-out 50ms !important;
}

.tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned]):not([fadein]) {
  -moz-transition: min-width 200ms ease-out,
                   max-width 250ms ease-out,
                   opacity 50ms ease-out 20ms !important;
} 

[Ryrynz]

That's done it. -Bow-

[megaman]

It was FF13 that had the slightly smoother tab opening and closing animations. I haven't tested with the standard theme but with GlassMyFox and my current theme it's noticeable and brings it a little closer to Chrome's tab closing smoothness.

Is the tab closing really that much of something to address?
You are not paying attention to that much, at least not all the time.

This goes to me the same about the tab sliding.

If you were talking about tabs being more responsive and acting towards your actions, in 13 than 12, then that is something to look forward to.

[Moonchild]

If you were talking about tabs being more responsive and acting towards your actions, in 13 than 12, then that is something to look forward to.

It wasn't about responsiveness, it was about visual smoothness of the animation, which is increased if the animation is slower.

[megaman]

It wasn't about responsiveness, it was about visual smoothness of the animation, which is increased if the animation is slower.

That is why I said "if," since there is a chance that it does seem more pleasing.

Your call if you want to put it, but you said it times before, "We cannot please everyone."

Edit: I would want the tabs and their actions to be more responsive and smooth, but I understand the limits.

[Moonchild]

Transition speeds are shorter in Pale Moon to make the tabs more responsive to user input. More responsive AND more smooth? You can't have the cake and eat it too

[Rohugh]

Your call if you want to put it, but you said it times before, "We cannot please everyone."

True, it is one of the first things I turn off when setting up the browser, I don't see the need for them to be animated.

[Ryrynz]

When your talking maybe an extra hundred or so milliseconds it's not really a big deal, I'd rather have it close more gracefully rather than closing faster.
Some people prefer instant perhaps even completely non animated stuff like back in the XP days, whatever floats your boat.

Transition speeds are shorter in Pale Moon to make the tabs more responsive to user input. More responsive AND more smooth? You can't have the cake and eat it too

And fair enough, that is your design choice and in this case nobody was asking for response AND smoothness.
Defaults are there as a starting point, one config never will suit all as you've said, being your browser it's configured mostly how you and other developers want it out of the box.

Still a better browser than Firefox.

[megaman]

Transition speeds are shorter in Pale Moon to make the tabs more responsive to user input. More responsive AND more smooth? You can't have the cake and eat it too

My limitations involve hardware, but Nightly version seems to keep up. Whatever is keeping it lean, I hope it makes its way to PM's later versions.

Ryrynz said it right, even though I like this improvement in Nightly, it still cannot compete with Pale Moon.

[Ryrynz]

Yeah, nightly is nice, I hope there aren't any problems with keeping the 12 code base and patching in the best bits of 13+ hopefully that doesn't end up being too much hassle.