139855 - sidebar should use dropdown, not tabs (to save vertical space)

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Sidebar, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Gedikian]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
BuildID:    20020423

The usability of the sidebar decreases with the more tabs you add to your 
sidebar. The problem stems from the fact that you guys display all the tabs 
simultaneosuly to allow the user to sellect which sidebar's contents you'd like 
to see.

The more scalable and usable sollution to the sidebar would be create a 
combobox type interface where you can see the current sidebar that you're 
viewing and a button near it allows you to see the other sidebars available to 
you and give you the option to switch to change the view would suffiently 
enhance the user experience of the sidebar.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch the app
2. Open the sidebar
3. Add several additional sidebars
4. try to view view a sidebar, the space allocated to actually viewing the 
contents gets less and less with the more sidebars you actually add.

Comment 1

[Bamm Gabriana]

Such a button already exists. It's call the Tabs button to the right of the
word "Sidebar". I myself only check two or three sidebars at a time, and
then use this button to select another sidebar and deselect the current.

The only difference is you want to allow selection of only one tab at a time.
The current lets you choose more than one, but it lets you choose only one
if that is what you prefer.

Comment 2

[Alfonso Martinez]

Confirming request, changing severity to enhancement.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

cc caillon

Comment 4

[Alfred Kayser]

This is more than just an enhancement.
There are about 64 open bugs on the sidebar tabs.
As they are only 'screen space consuming' as well as
memory consuming a single dropdown selector would perform much better.
Mozilla development should focus on performance, memory usage, and
overall stability. So the feature-rich sidebar thing should be reduced to this.

Comment 5

[Donald Noble]

I think a drop down menu would be sensible for people that have lots of sidebar
tabs, and/or with small screens.

As sidebars are just web pages that provide a certain feature, then why not have
a menu similar to the bookmarks menu?

Another enhancement would be to be able to bookmark groups of tabs (already
possible in the main browser) so you could have a set of tabs for news, general
browsing, searching, web development for example.
This would make it much quicker to change between sets of tabs than it is at
present. at present the menu closes after every change, making multiple changes
slow.

Comment 6

[home]

I think this would be a valuable addition - the 'Tabs' dropdown is too slow to
be effective in this capacity, as you must click on a tab once to show it, then
again to hide it. A combo box would be a far better solution than using tabs -
the 'Tabs' dropdown could even be retained in order to control the items
available in the combo (though this would perhaps be better relegated to a pref
panel).

I think that this would be the way to go once FireBird takes over from Seamonkey
- it would be a shame to lose the tabs, as I for one find them very useful. As
it stands FireBird only puts Bookmarks and History in the sidebar.

Comment 7

[Alexander Nguyen]

Some Microsoft programs have "personalized menus" that remember the last few 
selected options and hide lesser-used options. Windows XP's Start menu has an 
area for "pinned" programs. The sidebar could pin the standard panels 
(bookmarks, history, downloads (though I think that a download manager with 
retention window crud would be a better solution)), insert a separator, then 
list the other panels in order of decreasing usage.

Comment 8

[Peter Lairo]

Bug 209642 covers this issue for Mozilla Firebird. This bug was filed against
the Mozilla Browser Suite. I suggest we keep these bugs separate until we know
how the two "products" are to be managed in bugzilla.

Comment 9

[Jose J. Rodriguez]

Apart from the space taken when using lots of tabs (something which I don't do
personally),I also think a dropdown selection would be more efficient, because
the present Sidebar arrangement makes you move the mouse all the way to the top
or bottom to select another tab to view. This is quite a bother when you have to
switch often between say Bookmarks and History, for example.

Comment 10

[Alexander Nguyen]

Actually, enforced alphabetical order of sidebar items might prove faster for
scanning than usage order.

Comment 11

[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 12

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420

Comment 13

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Worth discussing.