1714475 - UI Fault: FF89's New Tabs Break Pinned-Tab Conspicuity

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[225]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2021-06-03 at 18.11.53.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

FF89.0 under MacOS 10.13.6. I pinned four tabs.

Actual results:

The new fenceless tab appearance breaks pinned tabs; now they're ghosts occupying a blank area at the left of the tab bar. There are four pinned tabs in the empty-looking area of the tab bar to the left of the "What's Free Trade Mean" tab in the attached screen grab. The only way to see they're there is to hover the cursor over them. There is no way to label or name a pinned tab, and no apparent way to restore the fences between tabs.

Expected results:

The pinned tabs should be visible, somehow or another, and there should be a way for the user to label or name them.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Andrei Purice]

Hey 225,
I tried reproducing this issue on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 91.0a1 (2021-06-08), beta 90.0b4 and release 89.0 but the pinned tabs are all visible for me. I also see that you have a lot of addons installed and one of them might be interfering.

Can you test the issue while in Safe Mode? You can find helpful info here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode .
Also a fresh new profile could help. You can find more about creating a new profile here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_6-create-a-new-firefox-profile .
If possible, you can test this issue on the nightly build as well. Download the build from : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ .

Comment 3

[225]

Hi, Andrei. Thanks for your ideas. I tested the issue in Safe Mode: no change. I also created a new profile and tested: no change. In every case, pinned tabs are visible only if the page loaded in that tab provides a favicon. If not, the tab is invisible: no name, no icon, no border around the tab, just empty space. The only way to know it's there is…to know it's there.

(I'd show you screen shots, but there doesn't appear to be a provision for them in comments, just in the primary post. But it doesn't really matter; the screen shot I posted at first remains applicable with my default profile in Safe Mode, and with an all-new profile.)

Comment 4

[225]

…and I've just tried it in the newest nightly build (firefox-91.0a1.en-GB) with exactly the same result: if the pinned tab represents a URL that provides a favicon, the favicon partially indicates the existence of the tab. There remains no border or other visual indication of the tab, so if no favicon, just blank space × however many no-favicon pinned tabs are lined up side-by-side.

Comment 5

[Calvin Walton]

In my testing, pinned tabs for sites without a favicon use a fallback icon (wireframe globe) and are visible. So I think the problem here might be that there are some cases (perhaps image decoding errors?) where the icon fallback isn't being used, and you get no icon at all.

That said, it's also possible for a site to provide a favicon which is either completely transparent or very low contrast, and Firefox needs some way to indicate the presence of a pinned tab in that case as well.

Comment 6

[Andrei Purice]

Since this issue already has a component the dev team will take over from here and hopefully they will have a fix for it.

Comment 7

[Calvin Walton]

Attachment: pin-tab-broken-testcase.html

Comment 8

[Calvin Walton]

Attachment: pin-tab-invisible-testcase.html

I have attached two minimal testcases to this bug.

The first ("broken") includes an invalid image which fails to decode. The fallback icon should be used in this case, but it is not, and the favicon is blank instead.
The second ("invisible") is a deliberately invisible icon - a simple 16x16 transparent PNG file.

Comment 9

[Calvin Walton]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2023-01-26 09-45-47.png

Note that it's not just pinned tabs affected by this issue - unselected regular tabs from a page that (deliberately or not) has a blank icon and title will become invisible if there are a sufficient number of tabs open that the "close" button is hidden on unselected tabs.

The existing testcases that I have attached can be modified to trigger this issue by adding:

<title>&nbsp;</title>

to the <head> of the document.