If KeePass is locked (which it is most of the time for me), the Kee logo mostly shows a huge “OFF”. This text is a stronger highlight than the normal icon and attracts a lot of attention, which is quite the opposite of what a disabled addon should do. Additionally, just showing this text is ugly and doesn’t fit into the regular UI design language of the browser.
This is why I’d like to propose to just grey-out the icon if the database is locked. This is the usual way of showing a disabled feature. It would attract way less attention and also fit into the overall design language.
Thanks for the feedback.
I get that it can be distracting… that’s kind of the point since a lot of people would not understand the subtleties of why they are not being asked to save passwords, having auto-fill work, etc. Fundamentally, I consider a disabled state of the extension to be exceptional and worthy of attention whereas you are expecting the opposite so I can understand why the status quo isn’t ideal for you. I know you’re not alone in wanting the disconnected state to be the default but I’m also certain that this isn’t the most common expectation among users so changes in this area may well end up being implemented as a non-default option, if at all.
The greyed out version of the old icon disappeared into the standard Firefox 57+ browser theme so this was not an option even if it were actually clear what the grey meant in comparison to the current red off label, orange off label and active state (suggestions to resolve this are welcome). At the time there were also clear guidelines from Mozilla that icons should not be greyed out but I don’t think this really took account of use cases like Kee where the disabled state is independent of the page that’s being viewed so even if this guidance is still active, perhaps we could ignore it for this use case.
It’s possible the new icon works better in greyscale so I’m not going to completely rule out a change in future but I’d be looking for some stronger evidence of the benefits and for the foreseeable future, a contributed PR for the optional change.
As for the appearance of the text, that is a standard part of the UI design language of the browser so if you think it needs changing, I’d suggest talking to Mozilla or Google about ways to improve the appearance of icon labels. Even if Kee were to move away from using this browser feature, there are many other extensions that use it.