1405923 - tabs too narrow

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1406478

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[lilydjwg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20171004220309

Steps to reproduce:

Open many tabs, some all them are of the same site


Actual results:

Tabs are shown with hardly one character visible, so it's hard to find and distinguish one tab from another with the same site icon. 


Expected results:

Tabs should be shown with several tabs visible, so the busy user can distinguish which is which from the text.

E.g. when the user is doing research about a topic, one may open many Google search tabs, or many bugzilla / forum / whatever site tabs, which shows the same site icon, so the text is important to quickly distinguish them and find the one to visit next.

Hovering to read the tab title is too slow for a busy user with lots of ideas currently in mind. And you can't read all the title text at one glance.

Especially without tab groups the user may more often have some unrelated tabs open in the same window, so there are more tabs to show, but usually related tabs are open besides each other so scrolling is less a problem.

Comment 1

[lilydjwg]

I was always laughing at Chrome users when I saw them clicking through lots of tabs to find the one they want, but now...

Comment 2

[Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]]

Can you post screenshot?
also, does the issue happen on clean profile? (to see if userChrome.css or something is interfering)

for me there are at least 7 or 8 characters.

Comment 3

[Ryan Jones-Ward [:sciguyryan]]

I believe this is probably in relation to the changes made in bug 1404465. If so I'm not sure that it would qualify as a "bug" since it was an intended change.

Comment 4

[lilydjwg]

Attachment: Tabs that can barely show one letter

Screenshot attached. It happens with latest nightly.

Yes browser.tabs.tabMinWidth pref is what I want to change. I didn't find that bug when I searched.

So....another useful UI tweak hiding behind a hard-to-find pref?

Comment 5

[Ryan Jones-Ward [:sciguyryan]]

(In reply to lilydjwg from comment #4)
> Created attachment 8915487 [details]
> Tabs that can barely show one letter
> 
> Screenshot attached. It happens with latest nightly.
> 
> Yes browser.tabs.tabMinWidth pref is what I want to change. I didn't find
> that bug when I searched.
> 
> So....another useful UI tweak hiding behind a hard-to-find pref?

Yeah, that looks like bug 1404465 too me.

:mconley - what's the correct venue for discussions relating to this UI change? I have seen a few complaints floating around in relation to this change. I'm not sure a "bug" is the correct place to discuss it. Can you enlighten me at all?

Cheers!

Comment 7

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

(In reply to Ryan Jones [:sciguyryan] from comment #5)
> (In reply to lilydjwg from comment #4)
> > Created attachment 8915487 [details]
> > Tabs that can barely show one letter
> > 
> > Screenshot attached. It happens with latest nightly.
> > 
> > Yes browser.tabs.tabMinWidth pref is what I want to change. I didn't find
> > that bug when I searched.
> > 
> > So....another useful UI tweak hiding behind a hard-to-find pref?
> 
> Yeah, that looks like bug 1404465 too me.
> 
> :mconley - what's the correct venue for discussions relating to this UI
> change? I have seen a few complaints floating around in relation to this
> change. I'm not sure a "bug" is the correct place to discuss it. Can you
> enlighten me at all?

The bug is now resolved and the change has been uplifted to 57 Beta. The change is the least risky solution but we intend to look into cleaning up tab display in the future and possibly provide a "narrow / default / wide" UI pref for this behaviour. In the meantime, if 76 is too narrow, feel free to change the value to a higher number.

> Cheers!

Comment 8

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Sounds like comment 7 answered the needinfo, so clearing.