Over to maxwalker@ to comment on the UI aspects of this

The transition is pretty fast. I have a hard time following it and seeing what's going on with the fade animations. Is this even intentional? It looks to me like the URL just immediately appear. It's already part of a view that's animating up into it's final position.

maxwalker: can you comment on this question?

I can clearly see this on my Android device.  When I select an existing tab from the tab switcher, the web content appears and yet the omnibox is blank for a pause (1 second?) before putting the URL in there.

It seems like the URL appears almost instantly when opening the tab switcher and then resuming to the same tab. This animation generally seems ok to me even. There is an unfortunate intermediate state where the page title and URL, both half transparent, overlap and become unreadable, see attached screenshot.

When switching to another tab the URL appears only after a ~1 second delay as Mark described. I think it would be great to show the URL instantly alongside the other toolbar elements (as in the resume-same-tab animation) if it's technically possible.

+helenepark (motion designer). Would you be interested in taking a look at this?

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	Tab Switcher.gif 3.5 MB View Download

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	Text Overlap.png 382 KB View Download

Yes, it would be nice if the URL could appear instantly alongside the other toolbar elements. Is this possible?

if no,

Could the URL fade on for about 0.5-1 second? Also, could the theme color on the status bar fade in sync with a fade in URL?

>> Yes, it would be nice if the URL could appear instantly alongside the other toolbar elements. Is this possible?

Justin, do you know if there is a technical reason that prevents us from doing this? I noticed that we do exactly this in Chrome Home, so it seems possible. Thanks!

>> >> Yes, it would be nice if the URL could appear instantly alongside the other toolbar elements. Is this possible?

>> Justin, do you know if there is a technical reason that prevents us from doing this? I noticed that we do exactly this in Chrome Home, so it seems possible. Thanks!

I doubt it, but tedchoc can hopefully confirm.

Chrome home is different because the toolbar isn't attached to the tab, so they can animate at different rates.

The problem with the old UI was that the toolbar and tab animate together.  The omnibox is normally rendered with Android widgets, but in the tab switcher, we take a snapshot of the omnibox and generate a GL texture representation.  We then can animate the tab and toolbar seamlessly.  We only keep a single toolbar texture around, which means we only have the text for the current tab and we simply draw over it with an opaque box for other tabs.

So the first question about whether we can show the URL instantly, is that currently no.  We can't keep snapshots of each URL as they are expensive.  Generating them dynamically could work, but you'd very likely see a flicker between them as you can't guarantee sync timing.

The URL fading is definitely feasible, and is what Chrome home does.  But right now, we should defer investing in the non-chrome home UI until we make a decision there.

Sounds good, thank you Ted. 

Removing Needs-Feedback label, as the desired feedback (from designers) was provided.

As Chrome Home works fine, I'm putting a next action date of this in February, as by then we'll probably have a better idea of whether to invest more in the non-Chrome Home UI.

The NextAction date has arrived: 2018-02-02

tedchoc@, et al., this is probably worth re-evaluating.  (We previously punted it until the decision about Chrome Home was made.)

+mdjones who's been tracking all of the animation updates coming as part of modern.