Features/Thunderbird/Tabs On Top

Status

Team

Open issues/risks

• How does this impact the quick filter bar toggle? Where should this button be placed?
• How does this impact add-ons that assume that the menubar will be available across all tabs? Do such add-ons exist?

Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

As part of our ongoing UX refresh in Thunderbird, we'd like the tabs to be placed above the main Thunderbird menubar. This is similar to what has emerged in common browser UI's over the past few years.

2. Users & use cases

This change would affect all Thunderbird users.

The justification for this change is a more flexible UX. Since tabs are currently below the main menu bar, the main menu bar persists regardless of the type of tab currently being displayed. Thus, even if we're viewing a content tab, we still have menu buttons visible that do not apply at all to content tabs.

Generally, we sidestep this issue by having hooks that disable certain menu buttons for certain tabs (for example, the Get Mail button is disabled while viewing the Add-ons Manager tab).

What we propose to do instead is to move the tabs above the menubar, so that each tab type can have it's own menubar. This has a number of benefits:

1) More space for tabs that do not require a menubar 2) The menubar is guaranteed to be applicable to the current tab

3. Dependencies

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4. Requirements

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Non-goals

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Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

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6. User experience design

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Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

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8. Reviews

Security review

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Privacy review

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Localization review

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Accessibility

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Quality Assurance review

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Operations review

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Stage 4: Development

9. Implementation

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Stage 5: Release

10. Landing criteria

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Feature details

Team status notes