1871593 - Tabs overflow dropdown icon disappears making switching tabs impossible.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 583299

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect, P3)

Description

[BugZillian :bugger]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:121.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0

Steps to reproduce:

At work I have a ton of pinned tabs which is no problem because you can tap the dropdown at the right side of the screen to see tabs that aren't visible.

Actual results:

1. Either the dropdown arrow periodically disappears complete (can't switch to hidden tabs)
2. Or the whole row of tabs stops scrolling and instead there is a little 1/2 centimeter space with arrows that lets you tap left and roll or scroll but it is so small you can't see anything at all.

Expected results:

Firefox should consistently do the following:

1. The dropdown arrow should remain visible so that you can also select hidden tabs from the tab overflow menu
2. You should always be able to scroll through the open tabs from left to right without it restrict the scroll of unpinned tabs to less than 1 cm where you can't see (not helpful)

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 correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hello, thank you for the bug report!
Could you please attach a screenshot of the issue so I can understand it better?
Also, would it be possible to detail the steps to reproduce? Do i need only to have a lot of pinned tabs in order to reproduce this issue?
Thank you.

Comment 3

[BugZillian :bugger]

Hi there, I've encountered 2 different scenarios.

1. Typically I can scroll the whole horizontal row, pinned tabs and unpinned tabs, then suddenly it is limited to this area like 5 px wide, see image in this folder: https://drive.proton.me/urls/YKKEZEF0XR#GzdemKED9jQ0

2. The second behavior is that the downward pointing chevron completely disappears and then I can't even use that to view the overflow.

Comment 4

[BugZillian :bugger]

Forgot to add steps to reproduce, I have around 25 pinned tabs, and I'm using the following extensions:

• Proton Pass, SimpleLogin, UBlock Origin, Facebook Container, Multi-Account Container.

Comment 5

[BugZillian :bugger]

Attachment: Tabs issue

Comment 6

[BugZillian :bugger]

I should have asked but what is the expected behaviour currently? Because I really like it when you can scroll the whole row, and not sure at what point it decides to just be a little section the side with left/right arrows.

Comment 7

[BugZillian :bugger]

Sorry for all the comments but I don't see an edit button:

I found a short term work around by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0, so that regular tabs act liked pinned tabs in that I can scroll normally.

Comment 8

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Thank you for the additional details!
Reproducible on both Firefox 122.0 and Firefox Nightly 123.0a1.
Tested on:

• macOS 12;
• Ubuntu 22;
• Windows 10;

Setting as NEW so the developing team can have a look.

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

There's multiple bugs about this case of many pinned tabs.
Maybe the problem is trying to make tabs smaller so that many more can fit screen, and users and up pinning tabs as a workaround.
Maybe pinned tabs should scroll as well.
This is a question for UX to investigate.

Comment 10

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

I moved this as blocked by a different bug.