1285812 - Switch tabs by scrolling with the mouse wheel in the tab bar

Status: ASSIGNED

Description

[jeremy9856]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160623084759

Steps to reproduce:

Hello,

Firefox should allow switching tabs by scrolling with the mouse wheel in the tab bar. It's really convenient and, for what it worth, Google Chrome have the feature.

In the mean time this add-on work well but that should be an integrated feature.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-wheel-scroll/

Thanks !

Comment 1

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Enhancement/feature request

I see this feature of Chrome on Linux but not on Windows.

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Firefox uses the mouse wheel in the tabbar to scroll the tabs when they are overflowing. We won't be able to change tabs as that would break our current workflow. Tabs in Google Chrome don't overflow, they just get smaller.

At this point, it would be functionality better left for an add-on, allowing users to opt-in to the changed behavior that they want.

Comment 3

[jeremy9856]

I don't see how always, and not only when they are overflowing, switching tabs by scrolling with the mouse wheel in the tab bar will break anything ? Can you explain please ?

We make this feature optional anyway.

Comment 4

[jeremy9856]

I meant "We can make this feature optional anyway"

Comment 5

[:Gijs]

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #2)
> Firefox uses the mouse wheel in the tabbar to scroll the tabs when they are
> overflowing. We won't be able to change tabs as that would break our current
> workflow. Tabs in Google Chrome don't overflow, they just get smaller.
> 
> At this point, it would be functionality better left for an add-on, allowing
> users to opt-in to the changed behavior that they want.

FWIW, we implemented this for tabboxes in general in bug 281192, but explicitly did not implement for the tabbrowser. I don't actually know why. Maybe Dão can enlighten us? One of the ideas was to only do this if the tabbar is *not* overflowing. I'm not against wontfix, but I would appreciate some more context. :-)

(In reply to jeremy9856 from comment #3)
> I don't see how always, and not only when they are overflowing, switching
> tabs by scrolling with the mouse wheel in the tab bar will break anything ?

Because if you can't see what you're switching to then being able to switch is pretty much useless. We could make the current tab be always in the middle of the overflowing tabbox (if it's not at the end), but that has other downsides, such as always moving the tabbar whenever you switch tabs.

It also makes it much harder to quickly find a tab you're looking for in a tab bar - you'd have to repeatedly click (or click-hold) the scroll buttons, which is annoying if you have a mouse wheel / scrolling touchpad that could do the job just as well.

Comment 6

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

I lack the context as to the decision in bug 281192, but having a UI widget that changes behavior based on if the content is longer is ripe for unexpected outcomes.

Imagine a text box that when not overflowing, scrolling moves the cursor through the text while when the text is overflowing it will scroll the text. Somewhat similar behavior, but different enough through the two states to cause confusion.

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me) from comment #6)
> I lack the context as to the decision in bug 281192, but having a UI widget
> that changes behavior based on if the content is longer is ripe for
> unexpected outcomes.

There's no other context, the concern was exactly the one you're voicing. Most users don't ever get enough tabs to overflow, though, so I'm not sure if that concern is severe enough.

Comment 8

[jeremy9856]

I really think that should be implemented. For me there is no valid reason to not implement it.
Try the add-on to test the feature. It's really useful.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-wheel-scroll/

Comment 9

[jeremy9856]

Hello,

Is it possible to make it happen please ?

Comment 10

[jeremy9856]

It's really useful and it's a fairly simple thing to add and I hope it will be implemented :)

Comment 11

[jeremy9856]

Hello,

It's a fairly simple thing to add and I really don't understand why it's still not possible.
Can you add this to Firefox please ?

Thanks !

Comment 12

[Andre Klapper]

@jeremy9856: If you want some feature / bug fixed, either provide a patch, or (if you cannot) consider paying someone to write that patch for you, but please stop spamming bug reports with comments which add no useful information whatsoever and could be seen as just whining. Thanks.

Comment 13

[Dmitry Gutov]

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #12)
> @jeremy9856: If you want some feature / bug fixed, either provide a patch,
> or (if you cannot) consider paying someone to write that patch for you

Would a patch adding this behavior as an option be accepted, though?

Comment 14

[Alice0775 White]

When switching tabs with the mouse wheel, I think that you need considerably CPU power. Especially unloading tabs after session restore. 
Because, rendering occurs every time unloaded tab is selected by turning the mouse wheel.  If the desired tab is far away from the current tab, that problem will occur for all tabs in between them. It is no good idea.

Comment 15

[jeremy9856]

Nothing more than pressing Ctrl + Tab...

Comment 16

[Timvde]

For what it's worth: Tab Mix Plus currently provides shift+scroll to change tabs. I think this would be an acceptable compromise, not breaking the current workflow.

jaws stated in comment 2 that this is add-on functionality, but with 1246706 being WONTFIXed, I think this is not possible in a WebExtension world.

Comment 17

[DB]

Is this the proper channel to request this feature be enabled for the future WebExtension version of FF?  I've contacted plugin developers, but they all report that this feature won't be possible.

Comment 18

[Marco T]

I would also like this feature. The experience without it is just not the same.

I understand that part of the optimizations in Firefox Quantum come from prioritizing the current tab and quickly passing through tabs would disrupt that.

Maybe 1) the tab could actually become "current" only after the mouse pointer leaves the tabs area and 2) the feature could be optional. I am just desperate to find an equally convenient way to switch tabs.

Comment 19

[Chris Hobbs]

As someone else noted in bug 1246706, scrolling on the tab bar to change tabs is a feature of:

* anything using GTK+'s GtkNotebook
* anything using Qt's QTabWidget (which should include Opera, as I remember)
* anything using wxWidgets' wxNotebook (because it wraps GTK+ on Linux)
* Chrome/Chromium

It's so ubiquitous that I've come to rely on it, and Firefox not having it simply means it absolutely doesn't feel native to linux. Every single other native application I've used on linux has this feature and it's truly essential to me. I will not be able to upgrade past Firefox 56 without this feature. Note that Chromium doesn't implement this tab bar scroll on Windows, as it's non-native behaviour, and I think that's a fine decision. But please, make an effort to fit in, to be a good UX citizen on linux, and add this feature. Especially as you can no-longer "fix" it with addons.

Comment 21

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

Created attachment 8928487 [details]
Bug 1285812 - Allow switching tabs by scrolling in the tab bar when it doesn't overflow. (Linux only)

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/199738/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/199738/

Comment 22

[panzi]

> At this point, it would be functionality better left for an add-on, allowing users to opt-in to the changed behavior that they want.

This does not apply anymore since you removed the appropriate add-on APIs, letting us Linux user stranded.

Comment 23

[Maxime Corteel]

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #12)
> @jeremy9856: If you want some feature / bug fixed, either provide a patch,
> or (if you cannot) consider paying someone to write that patch for you, but
> please stop spamming bug reports with comments which add no useful
> information whatsoever and could be seen as just whining. Thanks.

Less people would whine if voting was enabled on Firefox issues. I'm not usually one to whine, but I don't see how users can influence the development of Firefox if they can't weigh in.

Comment 24

[:Gijs]

(In reply to Maxime Corteel from comment #23)
> (In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #12)
> > @jeremy9856: If you want some feature / bug fixed, either provide a patch,
> > or (if you cannot) consider paying someone to write that patch for you, but
> > please stop spamming bug reports with comments which add no useful
> > information whatsoever and could be seen as just whining. Thanks.
> 
> Less people would whine if voting was enabled on Firefox issues.

Voting is enabled on bugzilla, also for Firefox issues. This bug, for instance, has 9 votes at time of writing. Obviously, votes aren't some kind of guarantee people will work on the bug - bug 25537 has 32 votes and a gazillion dupes filed, and we quite intentionally never fixed it (and, IMO, it was good for the web that we didn't). In any case, if you're concerned about user participation in bugzilla in general, this specific bug is not a good place to raise that. Instead, consider the firefox-dev mailing list ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/firefox-dev ).

Fortunately for this bug, it's already assigned to someone and there's a patch up, so commenting/voting doesn't do anything. Let's just let Dão and Stephen get on with reviewing/improving/landing the patch.

Comment 25

[Adrian]

Regarding the patch, does this really disable scrolling as soon as there are too many tabs to fit in one line? Or does the main tab bar never overflow since tabs are made smaller and smaller?

Also, will this land for Windows too (since this bug has OS set to Linux now)?

Comment 26

[panzi]

Just in case anyone wonders how scrolling on tabs looks like under e.g. KDE I made a quick video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etc16CcYBUw

Tabs don't infinitely shrink under KDE either. Still, they have the scroll on tabs behavior that I am used to under Linux. :)

Comment 27

[brcha]

Shrinking tabs are a strange and wrong idea. As soon as they start shrinking, the usability starts shrinking as well. As a matter of fact, shrinking tabs is one of the reasons why I don't use Chrome or similar browsers.

I would prefer it if I were able to scroll the tabs like in pre-57 versions of Firefox, and just like in @panzi's video. And I'm pretty sure the author of Tab-Wheel-Scroll extension would be happy to port it to webextensions as soon as the functionality was added (or, someone else would port it). Just being able to scroll tabs before they overflow is a good thing, but I seriously doubt it would be overly complicated to enable catching mouse wheel events over tabs and enable some tabs.next()/.previous() methods in webextensions.

Comment 28

[DB]

I've found a solution that works for me, using a tool called AutoIt and this script by Github user Nurupo: https://github.com/nurupo/chrome-mouse-wheel-tab-scroller 
I've switched to Chrome now, to replace add-ons that were broken in Firefox 57, but I needed a replacement for scrolling tabs, and this tool fits the bill.  It supposedly works for Firefox, as well, so you might check it out.  Note that Windows 10 wouldn't let me install the pre-packaged executable.  I had to install AutoIt and then set up the script manually.  The source code is available and clean. 
I'm still hoping that this functionality returns to Firefox.  I held w/ Firefox for years, but with version 57 I no longer see anything unique about it vs. Chrome, aside from a less developed addon repository.  :(

Comment 29

[alain]

This code in Browser Console do the job on all platforms => https://gist.github.com/benoitryder/db1ed51ca0213b882806fad1f4540796

If Firefox can execute a Javascript code at startup, it will be great!

Comment 30

[Adrian]

BTW, chrome does not support this without outside hacks (autoit, autohotkey, etc), so having native support for it in Firefox would be a big plus :)

Comment 31

[Chris Hobbs]

Chrome does support this, but only on Linux. On windows the feature is disabled with no way to turn it on.

Comment 32

[Adrian]

Ah, good to know. So if this gets into FF on all OS it'll still be a plus ;)

Comment 33

[Gustav]

Is my bug ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418003 ) a duplicate of this one?

From what I can tell the only differences is that this bug will only scroll-select when not overflowing and only on Linux, while mine is a option(disabled by default) to always do scroll-select regardless of OS.

Comment 34

[Adrian]

Since there is still "linux only" in the title, can you please confirm that it will be (at least) possible to enable it with an about:config switch on Windows as well once it ends up in a release?

I really don't want to switch to Linux or start using awful hacks like Autohotkey to get this functionality. The current patch doesn't seem to contain any OS-specific logic, but the "linux only" in the title worries me.

Comment 35

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

(In reply to Adrian from comment #34)
> Since there is still "linux only" in the title, can you please confirm that
> it will be (at least) possible to enable it with an about:config switch on
> Windows as well once it ends up in a release?

No, that's not part of this patch. Bug 1418003 would be about that.