Location Prettyprinting

I can think of a number of extensions and enhancements to Firefox that really want to present themselves in a tab or a browser window, and just present a XUL page as their UI. For example, a bittorrent download manager could display extra information that way; some sort of bugzilla integration could use that to display a nicer view of a bug, etc. However, the URL bar will still say "chrome://foo/bar/content/baz.xul" or something indecipherable.

I suggest that we create a service that extensions can register with to allow for prettyprinting of chrome:// URLs in the Location Bar. That way, "chrome://foo/bar/content/baz.xul" could be displayed as "BitTorrent Download Statistics". "about:config" could display "Advanced Configuration". "about:" could display "About Mozilla Firefox", "about:blank" -> "Blank Page", etc.

Some notes:

The translated name cannot look like a URL; can't start with a registered protocol handler maybe, can't include a : in the first 20 characters, or similar
The location bar should have a different background (light blue?) if it's being translated, maybe with an icon similar to the lock icon that the user can click to see the actual chrome: URL.
Only chrome: and possibly about: URLs would be eligible for translation.

Thoughts from biesi

Implementation thought: what about showing the title attribute of the <window> for chrome:// XUL content as the url?

I'm not sure what I think of the idea itself... Maybe the chrome:// url should show when clicking into the location bar?

Thoughts from bsmedberg

Perhaps we should also suppress various kinds of browser chrome, such as the back/forward buttons, when we're showing "app UI" in a tab.

Location Prettyprinting