1402400 - Want to be able to make other buttons appear directly after the last tab when it's not overflowed (like 'new tab' button)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[B.J. Herbison]

The "Open a new tab" button is the only widget allowed to float to the right of the last tab. The user should be allowed to choose during customization which buttons are in that position.

In particular, I want to place the New Container Tab button and the "Open a new tab" button to the right of the tabs. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-drawer/ now that the widget is removed from Nightly.)

Steps to reproduce:
1) Customize and put the Library button to the left of the "Open a new tab" button.
2) Customize and put the Library button to the right of the "Open a new tab" button.

Actual results:
1) Both buttons stick to the right of the screen.
2) The "Open a new tab" button is to the left of the last tab and the Library button is at the right of the screen.

Expected result:
The user should be able to specify which buttons stick to the tabs and which go to the right.

One possible approach is to interpret a Flexible space as forcing anything to the left to stick to the tabs. Right now many Flexible space occurrences are needed.

Comment 1

[B.J. Herbison]

I was able to get the icons where I wanted it with fifteen flexible spaces, but the result was that with multiple tabs the size of the tabs was smaller than with no flexible spaces.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

We'll try to fix bug 1370791 but this bug as filed isn't really fixable. The tabstrip always extends, and the new tab button appearing next to the last visible tab is possible because there are in fact 2 new tab buttons. One is customizable, the other is fixed into the tabstrip and visible only when the tabstrip is not overflown and the customizable button is directly after the tabstrip.

To do the same with other buttons would require duplicating every other button, too. This would quickly become too complex to manage (we'd have to ensure the order of the buttons matched what was customized by the user, too), and that's all beside the "magic" behaviour of having flexible spacers toggle this behaviour (which would be undiscoverable for normal users). The increase in code complexity isn't worth the added functionality, moreso when the result isn't intuitive/discoverable.