133053 - unread tabs should be styled differently (eg bold)

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Garth Wallace]

It would be nice if it were possible to more easily keep track of which tabs you
have viewed. I think that the best way would be to have the titles of inactive
tabs become bold if a new document loads in them, to show "unread" state.
Activating an "unread" tab would restore the title to plain text. If a tab is
viewed while partly downloaded, made inactive, and finishes loading while still
inactive, it would also become bold to show that it contains unviewed material.

The use of boldface is intended to be consistent with the mailnews UI showing
the subjects of new/unread messages in bold.

3 examples (assuming a brower window with 2 tabs. Tab A is currently active,
neither are loading):

example I:
1) user clicks a link in tab A
2) user switches to tab B before the new document begins to display
3) document begins to "appear" in tab A (since the tab is inactive, it is not
visible, but if it were active parts of the page could be seen) -> tab A's title
becomes bold
4) document finishes loading
5) user switches to tab A -> tab A's title becomes plain (non-bold)
6) user switches to tab B again -> tab A's title is still plain

example II:
1) user clicks a link in tab A
2) document takes a a while to load (slow server) and user gets impatient, so
he/she switches to tab B partway through the download -> tab A's title is still
plain
3) document loading complete in tab A -> tab A's title becomes bold
4) user switches to tab A -> tab A's title becomes plain
5) user switches to tab B again -> tab A's title is still plain

example III:
1) user clicks a link in tab A
2) user switches to tab B before the new document begins to display
3) document begins to "appear" in tab A (since the tab is inactive, it is not
visible, but if it were active parts of the page could be seen) -> tab A's title
becomes bold
4) user switches to tab A (still loading) -> title becomes plain
5) document takes a a while to load (slow server) and user gets impatient, so
he/she switches back to tab B partway through the download
6) document loading complete in tab A -> tab A's title becomes bold *again*
7) user switches to tab A -> tab A's title becomes plain again
8) user switches to tab B again -> tab A's title is still plain

This was discussed on n.p.m.general and n.p.m.wishlist. Discussion starts with
<news:[e-mail]> and the "final" version given here was
proposed by grayrest in <news:[e-mail]>.

Comment 1

[Felix Miata]

On 2002032216 OS/2, all tab text is already bold (same font as top menu text).

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Mr. Mazda, I would have expected that the exact appearance of loaded unviewed
tabs would probably be theme-dependent.

Comment 3

[manojd]

After I posted a related thing in bug #146160
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146160), someone pointed out to
this. I have a little more to add to original post from Garth.

While Mozilla can automatically try to determine "read"/"unread" state of a tab,
I really want to be able to change this automatically determined state. See
motivation in description of #146160.

Precedent is also provided by Microsoft Outlook:
a) I can set it to either automatically determine the read/unread state of a
mail message.
b) In either case, I can manually flip the state.

Comment 4

[gabriel]

Re. comment 3, you could have context menu entries 'mark tab'/'unmark tab' which
would flip the bold/not-bold state. This would be in addition to the behaviour
originally requested.

I would also recommend having a pref 'mark unread tabs in bold' (default=NO) so
as not to confuse existing users.

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

The pref might confuse users as much as the feature.

Comment 6

[Laurent Duperval]

I,ve entered a similar bug for Phoenix, bug 209179. Galeon does this already so
it's feasible correctly. I don't know if they should be marked as duplicates or not.

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 9

[Philip Chee]

Setting Dependency.

Comment 10

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

At the moment (since SeaMonkey 2.1 IIUC), it is not possible to distinguish unread tabs from already-seen non-current tabs because of bug 564100 which in turn depends on Firefox bug 487242. The good news is that work on bug 487242 has recently resumed, so there is something on the distant horizon which looks as if it might be the end of the tunnel.

FYI I use the following (with one rule commented out pending bug 564100 resolution) to set various background colors on the tabs, depending on: never seen / current / onmouseover. All these are in my SeaMonkey userChrome.css (in the chrome subfolder of my profile):

/*
 * highlight tab at mouseover; highlight selected tab
 * and show which tabs haven't yet been read
 */
.tabbrowser-tabs tab
  /* none of what follows:        grey            */
  { background-color:   #CCC                    !important
  }
  /*
   * on recent builds, alas, the [selected] attribute
   * is only present when true, so the following rule
   * would be activated out of turn for tabs already
   * seen but not current anymore (see bug 564100)
.tabbrowser-tabs tab:not([selected])
  \* not yet read:                white           *\
  { background-color:   white                   !important
  }
   */
.tabbrowser-tabs tab:hover
  /* onmouseover:                 red             */
  { background-color:   #C00                    !important
  }
.tabbrowser-tabs tab[selected=true]
  /* current:                     aqua            */
  { background-color:   #0FF                    !important
  }
.tabbrowser-tabs tab[selected=true]:hover
  /* current on mouseover:        yellow          */
  { background-color:   yellow                  !important
  }

Comment 11

[:aceman]

I think bug 487242 may help here.

Comment 12

[Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking]]

http://userstyles.org/styles/53667/