1423686 - Inactive tab close/mute buttons should become visible on hover

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1391808

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[JDev]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171128222554

Steps to reproduce:

When a large number of tabs are open the UI hides all close/mute buttons except those on the active tab and any actively producing audio.  This creates several use case issues that can inconvenience users due to the inability to close a tab without switching to it first or mute a tab before audio begins playing or using the context menu.

Example:
Opening a YouTube tab in the background the video will not start playing until you switch to the tab, however, if you wish to mute the tab first (for many reasons) the only way to do so is hidden in the context menu.  Making the mute button visible on that tab on hover, with a delay (akin to tooltips delay) would provide the user with an obvious way to accomplish the task without interfering with switching to tabs.

Similarly with closing a tab, if you accidentally open a tab in the background that you know is going to misbehave when you switch to it, you should have the ability to close it with the close button.

For clarity the request is to:
 - Make a single tab display the mute/close buttons after ~1000ms of hovering, regardless of any other conditions, including preemptively muting a tab that has not yet played audio

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to JDev from comment #0)
> When a large number of tabs are open the UI hides all close/mute buttons
> except those on the active tab and any actively producing audio.

I can't reproduce this with the mute button. AFAIK we never hide it in background tabs.

Comment 2

[JDev]

Go to Youtube, play a video with audio, pause the video, and switch to another tab.  The mute button disappears and won't return until the video is unpaused.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to JDev from comment #2)
> Go to Youtube, play a video with audio, pause the video

At this point the mute button will disappear even if you don't switch to another tab. A paused video doesn't make sound, hence the mute button disappears.