1573745 - Tab Preview

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Plavozont]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

I hover mouse cursor over some tab, which is not the current one

Actual results:

Tooltip text appears after a while

Expected results:

Current web page, should change to the web page of the tab I hovered, so I could preview it. After that, moving mouse to other tabs should show the other pages. Switching between different page previews should be as fast as I move the mouse over tabs. When leaving the tab panel the current web page should return back.

The difference between the preview in Edge, or "taskbar previews" in Firefox is that the page is displayed full size as big as Firefox window. I have never been able to guess what page I am looking at in that tiny little preview squares because they are too small.

Same thing should happen when hovering over tab names in tab menu...

Thanks...

Comment 1

[Florens Verschelde :fvsch]

There are some strong reasons not to have this behavior by default:

1. UX: it's unlike how Firefox and most browsers have worked until then, and the change would be major, probably surprising many users.

2. UX: with no size or visual distinction between Preview (hover) and Switch to Tab (click), the difference between both interactions would be unclear to most users. It's likely that users would hover a tab, see the content change and think that now hovering changes the tab, move the cursor away... and be frustrated that the content reverts back to the "previous" tab.

3. Performance: Switching to a tab can be a costly operation. Some tabs can be unloaded (when we defer loading tabs until they're selected). Moving the cursor across the tab strip would trigger a lot of page loads and rendering work in a short time, potentially making the browser unresponsive on slow systems.

For these reasons, IMO such a feature can only be opt-in, and would reach and serve only a fraction of power users.

Still an interesting idea though.

In an ideal world, it would be great to offer options like "No preview", "Small preview" (shown below the tab), and "Full-size preview" (as described in this feature request). I wonder if Opera and/or Vivaldi have done it before, this seems right up their alley.

Comment 2

[Plavozont]

Great that you liked it! I think everyone who has 100+ tabs opened and has to click many times to find the right one would like it too. Maybe it is possible to implement it via some parameter in about:config and/or at least for "List all tabs" menu, by adding thumbs before text, and hovering it would show the preview (maybe hovering while holding ctrl button). Without triggering of unloaded tabs, just showing a text "Tab is unloaded". There is some kind of preview in FireFox already, that I didn't check out, that is not costly on performance, maybe it stores snapshots or something, they could popup on hover at least small size (but not too much)... And when they would popup they should appear at the same fixed place on the screen, not next to each tab, that is hovered, and without animation effects, i get serious dizziness when previews float over the screen))

Comment 3

[Plavozont]

OK, I'll summarize it: Parameter in about:config to activate the feature that let you preview web pages while hovering a tab (or "List all tabs" menu item) and then holding ctrl button. If a tab is unloaded show the text "Tab is unloaded" with small (medium) thumbnail image of a web page under that text.

💡Oh, oh, I know! When user hover a tab - tooltip appears, that gives a tip "Hold ctrl button to see the preview"!

...I've been thinking on the time when firefox should take snapshots of pages... Maybe some time after the user leaved the tab (async, depending on processor load), to take a shot of a page "how the user remember it". And if the user will try to cycle through all the tabs as fast as he can by holding ctrl+pgdown 🤭, then take a snapshot only if the user spent more than ~5 seconds on that tab.