Closed Bug 156026 Opened 22 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Functionality of tab's icon

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
Tabbed Browser
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED EXPIRED

People

(Reporter: gsasha, Unassigned)

References

Details

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020510
BuildID:    20020510

The icon displayed on the tab's title should be active:

When clicked, it should display the context menu (probably the same that opens
on right-click.

Double-click should close the tab.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
This is not a bug; it is enhancement request
*** Bug 156027 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 156028 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Double clicking the icon to close sounds like a bad idea. It certainly wouldn't
be expected behavior (nothing else closes on a double-click).
Personally, I wish that the icon could be removed altogether - it's essentially
a waste of space.  (And I don't know if I believe it should be kept through
enhancements such as suggested here either.)
I disagree. When you have many tabs which are being loaded at the same time,
it's very convenient to know which of them has loaded already, and which are on
the way.
Perhaps I should clarify.  When the tab is being loaded, yes I agree that seeing
the "loading" symbol is useful.  However, once the tabs have finished loading,
the static "bookmark" symbol is relatively useless and just takes up space that
could be used for tab title text.  I would prefer it if the icon were only
present during tab load.
But on sites that support the site icon, like mozilla.org for instance, the icon
is displayed on the tab instead of the bookmark. This _does_ convey very useful
information.

Ok, now that I think of it, my main problem with the tab is the organization of
its popup menu.
The operation "new tab" which is the first in the menu, is not useful at all,
since there is an easy shortcut (Ctrl-T). The operation "Reload Tab" is also not
very useful, since there is a LARGE reload button and also a shortcut (Ctrl-R,
btw, pity that F5 doesn't do it too).

But the operation "Close tab" is either deep inside the menu, or done by a small
button at the right. Now, the most often thing I do with the tabbed browsing is
(and I suppose I'm not alone at that) to open a lot of links in new tabs, then
check them one after another and close those that are not interesting. Thus I
find the absence of an easy method to close a tab as hurting productivity.

So well, I don't REALLY mind if the icon is gone (though I like it), but I think
an efficient method to close a tab is necessary. And probably, a keyboard
shortcut would be just fine.
Okay, you've convinced me.  While, personally, I can't stand site icons, I will
agree that they are useful enough to some people that their presence on static
tabs is actually a benefit.  (I just wish that tab icons followed my preference
of turning off site icons so that I would see neither.  Or, at the very least,
make the site icons actually DO something useful - like the icon to the left of
the displayed URL being viewed does in its ability to be dragged and dropped.)

As for the tab context menu, I also agree.  There's not much point in having the
functions that are readily available elsewhere stuck at the top - they should
either be removed altogether or moved to the bottom of the list list, exposing
those functions that are NOT readily available elsewhere.

BTW: The keyboard shortcut to close a tab is Ctrl-W.

As for the original points of this bug itself, I think that left-clicking on an
active tab should bring up the context menu just as right-clicking on it does. 
(Clicking on an inactive tab would only make it active, not make it active and
bring up the menu.)  I don't see any reason to distinguish between the tab icon
and the tab title space with respect to this.  (In fact, because of it's
relatively small size, positioning the mouse cursor over the tab icon could be a
bit tricky - whereas positioning it anywhere within the tab itself is easy.)
Confirming bug.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Suggest rewording bug summary to "Tab context menu on left click."  (Unless you
still want to implement the 2nd point in your original comments of having a
double-click on the tab icon close the tab.)
I think it's more than just the left click.

1. yes, left click should open the menu
2. the menu should be reorganized
3. But the main problem is the easy method for closing a tab! I'm not sure of
the best solution, but some easy method for doing it with the mouse would be
cool. My personal belief is that both keyboard navigation and mouse navigation
should be complete by themselves - there should be minimal interference between
them. So, keyboard shortcut is fine, but double-click is good when I don't want
to  use kb.

Anyway, this is an issue that is easy to implement but hard to decide. I think
other GUI folks, with more experience than me, should have a say here.

I think that the proposed behaviour would be quite intuitive to windows' users
(don't know about other OS). 
Making possible to close a tab by double click in the icon could also fix the
bug (don't have right now the number) where is requested to have a "close tab"
icon in each tab. Double clicking doesn't happen by mistake so part of the
concerns about problems just would go away.

First of all, I don't think that there's any need to double-click the *icon* -
you should be able to double-click on any part of the tab itself.  (Again,
positioning the mouse cursor over the small icon can be a little aggravating,
finding the tab itself is easy.)

Lastly, if double-click is to be implemented at all, it should be documented in
the left-click menu that pops up (Close Tab     Double-Click Tab) so it's
discoverable.  There's nothing worse, to me, than functions that are
undocumented, something that seems to be an ongoing habit with Mozilla.

(Please don't say that popup text could be added to the icon mentioning the
above.  The text that pops us should be "Drag and drop this icon to create a
link to this page" once bug 111905 is fixed.)
QA Contact: sairuh → pmac
Product: Core → SeaMonkey
Assignee: jag → nobody
QA Contact: pmac → tabbed-browser
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
Status: NEW → UNCONFIRMED
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
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → EXPIRED
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