1713833 - Tab close buttons get hidden when tabs shrink in width, and do not reappear on hover

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Yannis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

Keep opening new tabs until the close buttons (X) get hidden.

Actual results:

The close button on not-currently-selected tabs is hidden. You can no longer close the tabs unless you switch to that tab.

Expected results:

The close button should appear on hover, just like in Firefox versions <89.0

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Theme' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Marcela (Please NI request to Brindusa Tot)]

Hi Yannis!
I was not able to reproduce this issue in latest Nightly version 91.0a1 (2021-06-01) (64-bit) in macOS 11. I opened a lot of tabs and I could see the close button in the active tab, or in any other tab after it was selected. As far as I understand, Firefox shows the close button on all tabs if they can be made visible in the window. Once the window starts to shrink, it only shows the close button on the active tab. You can see more information on this link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tabs-organize-websites-single-window.
We may suggest marking this issue as an Enhancement but If the problem is another or you consider that this is an issue, could you kindly provide a screen recording showing us the issue so we can try to reproduce it on our end?
Also, you can try to reproduce it on latest Nightly and tell us your input. You can download it from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/.
Thanks!

Comment 3

[Yannis]

(In reply to Marcela from comment #2)

Hi Yannis!
I was not able to reproduce this issue in latest Nightly version 91.0a1 (2021-06-01) (64-bit) in macOS 11. I opened a lot of tabs and I could see the close button in the active tab, or in any other tab after it was selected. As far as I understand, Firefox shows the close button on all tabs if they can be made visible in the window. Once the window starts to shrink, it only shows the close button on the active tab. You can see more information on this link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tabs-organize-websites-single-window.
We may suggest marking this issue as an Enhancement but If the problem is another or you consider that this is an issue, could you kindly provide a screen recording showing us the issue so we can try to reproduce it on our end?
Also, you can try to reproduce it on latest Nightly and tell us your input. You can download it from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/.
Thanks!

Hi Marcela,

You might be right that this is not a bug, but an enhancement request.

The issue is that the close button does not appear on hover, like it used to on previous versions (up to version 88). So the only way to close a shrinked tab is to select it first, then close it. This was not the case in Firefox <89.0, so at first thought I figured it's probably a bug and not intentional.

Comment 4

[Marcela (Please NI request to Brindusa Tot)]

Thank you for your reply.
Anyway, I was unable to reproduce this issue in Firefox Release version 87.0 on macOS 10-15. After opening many tabs, the close button did not appear while hovering over any of the tabs.
Understanding that the requirement could be treated as an Enhancement, I will change flags accordingly so that the corresponding team can have visibility.

Comment 5

[Yannis]

(In reply to Marcela from comment #4)

Thank you for your reply.
Anyway, I was unable to reproduce this issue in Firefox Release version 87.0 on macOS 10-15. After opening many tabs, the close button did not appear while hovering over any of the tabs.
Understanding that the requirement could be treated as an Enhancement, I will change flags accordingly so that the corresponding team can have visibility.

I apologize for my mistake. I switched back to Firefox with the new update after using another browser for a few months and it seemed immediately counter-intuitive. I should have verified this functionality was present before.

Thank you for changing the flag.

Comment 7

[Guido Rota]

Attachment: Bug 1713833 - Show tab close button on hover r=#tabbrowser-reviewers,dao

This commit causes the tab close button to appear when hovering on
a tab, even when the tab close button is hidden to make more space
for the tab title.

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Thanks for writing this patch, but we won't land it in Firefox, as it would too easily cause accidental clicks on close buttons when switching tabs. This would be more of a problem for horizontal tabs than vertical tabs, because with vertical tabs the close buttons at least appear all lined up on a vertical axis.