sane defaults (security icons)

[Cristian Tibirna]

On Sunday 16 January 2005 19:01, Maksim Orlovich wrote:
> > Secure connection is already indicated in at least two places. As this
> > new yellow urlbar is confusing and does not play nice with some colour
> > schemes,
> > it should be just reverted.
>
> To illustrate the "does not play nice with some colour schemes", let me
> produce a screenshot from sarah at #kde-devel. She first showed it a few
> days before this discussion, and now kindly let me grab it:
>
> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~maksim/sarah-konq.png
>
> Yes, there is text in the location combo.

Of course hardwired colors are to be avoided like devil. I always found the 
color changing location bar (that I first observed in firefox) a nuisance. 
Even now, when I'm used to it, it makes me startled a bit each time, as I 
have the atavic reaction to a danger coming (yellow).

I think the locked padlock should be enough, even if it's not easy to 
distinguish from an unlocked one. It's only that it should be placed at left, 
just before the url icon. It's more obvious there, I believe, because it's 
where we start to read. Perhaps 1-3 loops of a suggestive animation on this 
padlock icon (plus an eventual suggestive sound effect, if sound themes are 
activated by the user) would help too.

The toolbar icon was a bad idea because it's unconspicuous. The status bar is 
a bad location because I believe most users rarely look there, apart from 
looking for a link's url (hence even less conspicuous).

Thank you for listening.

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org