Tabs and Trunk
By glazou on Thursday 31 August 2006, 17:18 - General - Permalink
I wanted to title this post "Dabs and Drunk" but I was not sure everyone knows a Dab is a beer...
I think there is something really bad in the way tabs are handled in Firefox on the trunk. Let me explain:
- suppose your window is quite wide and you have 3 tabs/tabpanels; each tab has the same width.
- add tabs until there's not enough space for the next tab; tabs start shrinking a bit everytime you add a new tab...
- ...until there's not enough space for each tab; tabs don't shrink ad infinitum like in Firefox 1.5 and, instead, two scroll arrows appear on each end of the tabbox to scroll between tabs. A new... uuuhh... well... thingy is present at the right of the tabbox to select between tabs.
Ok, so suppose you have enough tabs in your browser to make appear the arrows. You select a tab, let's say the 3rd tab of your n tabs, and click on the close button. Click again on the what-was-the-next-tab's close button. And so on...until there are not enough tabs left in the browser to maintain the smallest tab width. And suddenly you can't click any more on the close button because the close button has MOVED ! You need to move your mouse to click the close button. Yeah, I know, you can still control-W ; but if I am using my mouse, it's perhaps BECAUSE i prefer using my mouse, and not my keyboard.
Sorry friends, but I think this is not a very good UI and the problem I described above should not happen. If you start putting a scrollbox around tabs, then tabs should not shrink.
Personnaly, I don't like at all the new tab system.
Comments
Does that mean you have a wonderful proof-of-concept tabbing extension in your mind, or simply you have no better idea that the current implementation and you do love it ?
celui: the latter
"I wanted to title this post "Dabs and Drunk" but I was not sure everyone knows a Dab is a beer..."
Hé hé ! Les amateurs de la série des Dortmunder de Donald Westlake sont au courant
Tu vas sûrement me prendre pour une buse, mais as-tu essayé l'extension Tab Mix Plus ? Elle permet entre autres choses de garder une taille d'onglet relativement constante, et de la mettre sur plusieurs lignes quand y en a trop. Chez moi, le réglage est tel qu'il n'y a jamais plus de 7 onglets (en plein écran) par ligne. C'est clair que tout mettre sur une ligne ne sert pas à grand chose, et personnellement j'espère qu'ils implémenteront directement cette fonctionnalité dans le firefox originel (si j'ai bien compris la fonction "retrouver les onglets précédemment fermés" de la beta-2.0 vient de là aussi, avant dans l'extension SessionSaver).
I'm currently using FF2 beta1 and it regularly drives me insane that you can close a background tab... invariably it's the right most one as muscle memory fromFF1.5 kicks in...
One of the advantages of having "too many" tabs is that the close buttons disappear for all but the active tab...
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show...
When reading this post (in Safari) I realiser that Safari has a similar problem. When opening lots of tabs they shrink a little, and when trying to click on the closebutton of the 2nd (till Nth) tab the close button does also move when the number of tabs has been reduced enough...
I don't understand at all the buzz around having a close button on each tab.
The way Firefox 1.5 worked having a single close button closing the current tab was far better. You could close a list of opened tabs by just multiple-clicking this close button.
Now you have to think about where the next close button will be... Grrr.. I hate thinking !
It works perfectly for me. I never used the "close" button before (like most of you, I'm more of a keyboard user), now I do from time to time.
If Firefox kept the size of the active tab fixed, that would solve this problem.
I'll test out the new tabs behaviour once 2.0 becomes final, but I'm guessing I will eventually download an extension to revert to the 1.5 behaviour.
I really do prefer the close button in FF1.5 than in FF2.0
I don't understand why we can't choose between the both system en FF2.0....
"tabs don't shrink ad infinitum like in Firefox 1.5"
Actually it doesn't shrink ad infinitum in FFox 1.5; when you have too many tabs, it doesn't show the new tab, on the rightmost side.
Konqueror has this for ages (at least 5 years, certainly plus), this works very well. However it has also the scolling switch on tabs (for one year and a half), and right click with sub-menu of all the tabs listed within it. There is also an option for the close button, which can appear in place of the tab icon by putting the mouse on it (I don't use it, ctrl-W is quicker).
I use more than 40 tabs per konqueror without any problems, while more than 10 tabs on Firefox is unusable. But I think the main problem remains memory usage, which is tremendous with Firefox, so that using more than 20 tabs is reserved to 2Go RAM owners or so...
There is a (hidden) pref for controlling the position of the close button :
browser.tabs.closeButtons.
Set it to 3 and you have a close button as it is in Firefox 1.5
The other values are described here: kb.mozillazine.org/Browse...