Hi, Today I created a small extension to integrate Firefox in to the Unity launcher [1]. So far, all it does is indicate download progress in the launcher. Apart from that, it doesn't really have any clear direction and I'm not sure what else I'm going to do with it just yet (I hacked on it because I wanted to play around with the launcher API and jsctypes before UDS, and I'd appreciate some design input before I do anything else with it). However, I noticed some limitations with the current launcher implementation and I'm not sure whether I'm just using it for the wrong things or whether they are genuine design issues: 1) It's not obvious what the progress bar on the Firefox icon actually indicates. I know it's download progress because I wrote the extension, but Firefox has ways of indicating progress for many other things too - eg, is it indicating page load, addon install or bookmark sync progress? 2) Considering point 1, should I limit the use of the progress bar to just indicating download progress, or should I use it for indicating the progress of other tasks too? 3) Because the launcher (and hence the progressbar) is hidden by default, I'm not sure whether I need to support additional (and legacy) methods for indicating progress of a task. Eg, Firefox normally opens a download progress window when starting a download. Ideally, I would like to not present that window at all when running in Unity (except for accessing finished downloads), and just rely on the launcher instead. However, with the progressbar hidden by default, I'm not sure that this is a good idea. 4) If I pause all my downloads, should I continue to show the progressbar or should I hide it? Should there be a way to indicate that the job has been paused? (looking at the Firefox code suggests the Windows launcher provides a way to indicate that a job is paused, although I don't have a Windows install to verify this). 5) If I open multiple instances of Firefox, they will all try to indicate progress through the same launcher icon. Thoughts? Regards, Chris [1] - https://launchpad.net/unityfox
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