Apart from the mosaic 2000s look (which is kinda ok), there is a big problem with pages that keep running for a while: the animation doesn't stop!
This means that if you are developing inside Eclipse, there is this 'thing' (i.e. the top right icon) that keeps moving and demand my brain's attention:
Since there didn't seem to be an preference or option to disable this behaviour, it was time to open up the Eclipse Grovy REPL Scripting Environment and fix it with a script :)
The solution
After a quick prototyping, I come up with this script to remove all icons from all opened WebBrowser editors (gist here):
After execution the icon is not there anymore :)
How I found the solution
Here are the steps I took to find the busy object to set the visible value to false
1) in the Grovy REPL I started by getting a list the ids of all current opened Eclipse views, but there didn't seem to be any web browser in there:
2) then I looked at the list the ids of all current opened editors, and found one that sounded promising: org.eclipse.ui.browser.editor
3) to confirm that that was the one I wanted, I looked at the titles of the current editors, and confirmed that the browser window I want to capture was there (the title was "Angular with Firebase Lite");
4) now that I knew the title, it was easy to get an EditorReference to it:
5) everytime I have an object reference that I want to take a look, I call the show({object}) viewer, since that will give me a nice TreeViewer of all methods, fields and properties ( see Viewing Eclipse and SWT objects (Workbench, Display and Shell) using Groovy's ObjectBrowser and using TeamMentor's Plugin ObjectBrowser for more details how this works)
6) in this case we don't want the EditorReference object. What we really want is the actually editor, which can be retrieved by invoking the getEditor(true) method (note how the object we are currently seeing in the Object Browser is the org.eclipse.ui.internal.WebBrowserEditor)
Here is a better view of this object:
7) looking at the org.eclipse.ui.internal.WebBrowserEditor object, the one that called my attention was the webBrowser field (which is an org.eclipse.ui.internal.browser.BrowserViewer object)
8) Inside the webBrowser object I found the busy field (which is an org.eclipse.ui.internal.browser.BusyIndicator object)
9) and finally inside the busy object I found the visible property (ie the getVisible and setVisible methods)
10) back in the REPL, it was time to do the same thing programatically.
First I got a reference to the webBrowser field:
... and then the busy field:
11) Once I had the reference to the busy field, it was easy to make it invisible (by just setting the visible property to false)
12) final step was to write a generic script that would work on all opened browser editor windows (a robust script would use the same trick I used in the integration with the Fortify plugin, where a callback is received on every new view opened (i.e. we could wait for new instances of the org.eclipse.ui.browser.editor to be opened, and apply the fix then))
To demonstrate the script in action, here it is the browser before:
... and here it is after:
Note: another way to to stop the constant animation was to just set the stop value to false, but this would only work for the current opened page (i.e. the animation would be back on page reload)
