johngraciliano Reporter
	Description • 8 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170115030210

Steps to reproduce:

Open the developer tools in the late 53.0a1


Actual results:

The developer tools minimize button is missing from the toolbox.  I cannot find it even with the "DOM Inspector" extension.  It was hidden in previous versions but I had it always accessible in my "complete theme" (Simple White X).   I believe it was ignored in the migration to html. 


Expected results:

The button should be accessible somehow.  The tools take too much of the screen space in my laptop.  I am glad Ctrl+Shft+U still provides the functionality.

I admit it may be possible I am just ignorant of the solution of how to recreate the button.

	J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)
	Comment 1 • 8 years ago

:pbro, you are the champion of the minimize button, what do you think?

It looks the conversion of the toolbox toolbar to React (bug 1245921) dropped the minimize button entirely, for the moment.

Should we leave as-is, restore it but hidden, or remove the feature altogether?

	Patrick Brosset <:pbro>
	Comment 2 • 8 years ago

(In reply to J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (use ni?) from comment #1)
> :pbro, you are the champion of the minimize button, what do you think?
> 
> It looks the conversion of the toolbox toolbar to React (bug 1245921)
> dropped the minimize button entirely, for the moment.
> 
> Should we leave as-is, restore it but hidden, or remove the feature
> altogether?
I had no idea this was being used!

When I landed it a long time ago, we took the decision to hide it temporarily because we hadn't ironed out all the UX details, and we didn't want people to start using it before we did, because we might have been changing the position of the icon for instance.

Then, things happen, as they do, and we never finished the UX nor enabled the button.
But the functionality has always been there, hidden.

So, whenever we talked about it since then, I was always saying that we should just get rid of the code, because it's basically dead code at this stage for something no one is supposed to be using.

Now, if people do use it, then I guess things are a bit different, and we could think of re-enabling the feature. I'm guessing however that the number of people actually using this thing is really low. You have to either know the shortcut or enable it in a custom theme as comment 0 says.

The thing is, we still haven't had the time to talk about the proper UX for it. In particular, these things should be solved:
- what should the icon look like, where should it go (the area it is in now is already quite busy, and if you make your toolbox narrow, stuff start to disappear).
- when should the toolbox auto-expand when it's minimized (like, if you select an element with the picker, should it expand before or after selection, there might other cases too).
- what should the minimize toolbox look like when it's docked to the side.

So, to summarize: we have some unmaintained and unfinished code laying around that recently got half removed, but a few people might be using it.
Of course, we never added telemetry to this thing, so we can't possibly know how many people are really using it.

Based on this, I would vote for removing the feature altogether.
I'm happy to get convinced otherwise, but maybe only for keeping the shortcut then. If it has a low maintainance cost and only works with the bottom docking host, then I guess there's not much risk.

	johngraciliano Reporter
	Comment 3 • 8 years ago

I believe this button was visible only for a short time and it is hidden in some (most?) versions.  Perhaps most people are not even aware of it.