At 03:16 AM 6/16/2003, Manuel Serrano wrote:
I was wondering if it could be possible to have an automatic hidden bar such as in many window manager (fluxbox, kde, gnone, ...). That is the navigation bar is automatically hidden until the mouse fly over the very top lines.
Whether it's technically feasible or not, I don't think this would be very usable, except perhaps in full-screen mode (by which I mean having the dillo window taking up the entire screen, with no title bar at the top). The activation area for one of these has to be narrow, or else you use up the space you gained by hiding it. And having a narrow area - say, the size of a window border - only works if you (a) are doing something that requires precision anyway, like resizing a window, or (b) can't miss it. The reason auto-hide and auto-show works for window managers is that they are at the edge of the screen, and there's nowhere else for the mouse cursor to go. You don't have to worry about hitting an exact area, you just send it in that direction and the toolbar appears. This is true for KDE, Gnome, Windows, Mac OS X, and so on. Putting this in a window would mean hitting something like a 5-pixel wide border, then hitting the toolbar buttons - essentially making it a drop-down menu that's hard to reach and extends horizontally instead of vertically. IMO, it would be more usable to take it a step further and make it an actual drop-down menu, with an activation area the size of the "show controls" button. (I'm not sure how the URL control would fit into this, though.) The exception would be if this were aimed at a true full-screen mode, in which case you gain the same advantages that window managers have by stopping at the edge of the screen. Kelson Vibber www.hyperborea.org