1919848 - Look into whether a shared new tab button behavior makes sense for vertical tabs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Sidebar, task)

Description

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

A question came up during review of bug 1906888 about the long term thinking around the new tab button in horizontal and vertical tabstrips, so I'm filing this to capture conversations since slack conversations disappear over time.

From Dao:

new-tab-button is removable, but for that we need to deal with CUI anyway, don't we? Currently it gets moved to the nav bar, but my understanding is that we don't actually want that, so moving it to the sidebar seems like it could solve that too. For users who manually moved the button to the nav or bookmarks toolbar, away from the tab strip, I think we'd want to leave it there, i.e. be consistent about horizontal and vertical tabs not having a new tab button in that case.

I this is a question for Ania/UX team around whether there is any thinking that the new tab button for vertical tabs should eventually be removeable.

And if we pursued this idea down-the-road a few things would need to be changed from the current behavior:

1. If a user "restores defaults" in the Customizable UI panel when in vertical tabs mode, it'd only restore the new tab button to the tab strip.
2. We'd have to make the vertical tabstrip visible when in the CUI panel is open, but then that could also indicate that the vertical tabstrip is customizeable beyond the placement of the new tab button (assuming it would be customizeable also in where it could be placed).
3. If we wanted to do 2, that would require additional work and I'm not sure if this aligns with the long-term UX vision for vertical tabs in the sidebar.