[Done] Resolving "menu bar at top" issue on Mac

[Wladimir Palant]

As we know from questions in this forum, many Mac users cannot find the menu bar in Adblock Plus preferences - it is located at the top of the screen rather than being inside the window. I checked this out a while ago, and there is no way to keep the menu bar inside the window on Mac. So the idea was to change the menubar into a toolbar (I though this was done in Firefox 3 for "Organize Bookmarks" but apparently it wasn't - "Import and Backup" is still inside a menu bar, it is only styled differently). I tried doing it on Windows and here is what I got:



This isn't too pretty of course, but more importantly there are some accessibility issues - access keys don't work, moving to the next menu is neither possible with the mouse (at least without clicking it) nor with the keyboard. So for the foreseeable future Mac OS X is going to be the only platform where this menu will be displayed as a toolbar.

There is a slight issue testing this because I don't have a working Mac emulator at the moment. Any volunteers willing to test an experimental build on Mac?

[Master X]

I am willing to test it. Where can I download it?

[Wladimir Palant]

Great, will send you a mail once I have it (should be done within the next two days).

[zeniko]

This isn't too pretty of course, but more importantly there are some accessibility issues - access keys don't work, moving to the next menu is neither possible with the mouse (at least without clicking it) nor with the keyboard.

You might want to have a look at Console² which offers something similarly looking (in my times, there was no menu bar at all, only a toolbar) and which worked around both of these issues through some CSS ( -moz-user-focus: normal; ) and a simple XBL binding to get menu like behavior. In case you want to try it out, please customize the Error Console's toolbar and add some more of the menu buttons.

[Wladimir Palant]

zeniko, I don't think I want "menu like behavior" - original Adblock did this and it was a huge hack that likely didn't feel right on *any* platform. Looking at the Bookmark Manager, it does exactly what I plan for Adblock Plus - uses menus on Windows and Linux and changes these into toolbar buttons on Mac. So this appears to be a supported solution, I better stick with it.

[Wladimir Palant]

That took a whole while longer but the development build is there now - http://adblockplus.org/development-buil ... provements

[Wladimir Palant]

I found a Mac to test on - the current solution doesn't look particularly pretty but it isn't too bad either.