Swipe up to go home is a great gesture, but there is also a need to have an actual home button that would accept press/long press events. This would make it easier to take screenshots and launch the window manager. In https://github.com/apc-io/apc_b2g_gaia, a "home button" appears in the status bar. Could we implement something similar?

This would make workarounds like Bug 945996 unneeded.

This would also remove any clash that may be occurring with the screen reader as it use 2 finger swipe for scroll (but perhaps not for edge gestures)

(In reply to Joshua Smith [:joshua-s] from comment #0) > Swipe up to go home is a great gesture, but there is also a need to have an > actual home button that would accept press/long press events. This would > make it easier to take screenshots and launch the window manager. In > https://github.com/apc-io/apc_b2g_gaia, a "home button" appears in the > status bar. Could we implement something similar? Are you proposing placing a graphical home button at the bottom to become a permanent fixture? If so wouldn't that permanently steal away a section of the display (and also change the device's available resolution)? Given the default orientation of the tablet (landscape) that seems a pretty significant portion. My suspicion is that in the future there will likely be devices (such as the Tab/F1) that ship without a separate home button and we will have to work our interactions into that context. (I'm not at all making a case against the home key. I very much like and I think prefer it.)

(In reply to Caspy7 from comment #3) > Are you proposing placing a graphical home button at the bottom to become a > permanent fixture? If so wouldn't that permanently steal away a section of > the display (and also change the device's available resolution)? Given the > default orientation of the tablet (landscape) that seems a pretty > significant portion. No, I am not proposing an android-like home button bar. My thought was to add a home button to the left side of the status bar (at the top). The rocketbar field would be pushed to the right of it. I have attached a picture of what I envision it to look like. If you want, I can draft up a more formal UX proposal.

All great stuff :)

This should only block flatfish-ux ;)

How about this solution, We have a "Homescreen" and a "Cards View" button inside the notification bar lower menu. The one with Settings etc. as buttons. We would also have to change the behaviour of the notifications bar to reveal itself via the "Swipe from top" gesture even if it hidden. Basically, the notification bar will never be disabled but just hidden in case the app demands it. As it is we are losing on "Swipe from bottom" gesture facilities. Using this solution would free that gesture and offer a reasonable way to trigger those events. The fixed Home Soft Key needn't be visible always which would free a lot of screen space especially on large screen tablet devices like FLATFISH.

OK. But also adding "back" and "options" virtual buttons along with the virtual "Home" button would be nice.

Firefox OS is not being worked on