1391808 - Close icon on a tab should only be visible when the tab is hovered

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Theme, defect, P5)

Description

[Bruce]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20170815141045

Steps to reproduce:

This is how it is in the interactive mockup.

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

I think it is a bad UI.
Because, When you click a tab with the intention of selecting it, there is a possibility of clicking without predicting that a close button will appear there. in this case, the tab may close unexpectedly.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #1)
> I think it is a bad UI.
> Because, When you click a tab with the intention of selecting it, there is a
> possibility of clicking without predicting that a close button will appear
> there. in this case, the tab may close unexpectedly.

Yes, this is why we hadn't done this in the past.

I'm putting this in the reserve with a low priority for now, but it may end up wontifx unless UX can make a strong case for this.

Comment 3

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #2)
> (In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #1)
> > I think it is a bad UI.
> > Because, When you click a tab with the intention of selecting it, there is a
> > possibility of clicking without predicting that a close button will appear
> > there. in this case, the tab may close unexpectedly.
> 
> Yes, this is why we hadn't done this in the past.

This is true, and it is a concern. Want to evaluate the trade-offs and how real of a concern it is.

I agree we shouldn't mess with this now. We have a bucket of post-57 tab work we want to look into. I will attach this to that once we figure out how to organize that :)

Comment 6

[JDev]

The close button, as well as the mute button, should be treated in the same manner as tooltips.  ~1000ms delay, then all other concerns are set aside and they are displayed on hover.  Meaning it doesn't matter if audio is playing or the tab is in the background, etc if you leave the mouse there long enough the buttons gets displayed.  

Aside from the various usecases where the user wants these things visible/intractable, it's bad UI/UX leaving the user to guess the conditions under which a button will appear or not.  They should always have a straight forward way of getting to a GUI element they think should be there.