1979656 - New Tab Management UI pushes my tabs far away and hard to reach

Status: NEW

(Firefox for Android :: Tabs, enhancement)

Description

[lilydjwg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:143.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/143.0

Steps to reproduce:

Try to switch tabs via the tab list on a phone.

Actual results:

With the UI, the tab list occupies the whole screen and my first two tabs along with suspended tabs are out of reach. I have to use another hand to select my tabs, which is very inconvenient (e.g. when commuting on a bus or subway train, my other hand needs to hold to the handrail; moving my holding hand up can make it reachable but isn't always an option because the phone may easily fall off my hand while traveling).

Expected results:

In the past, when the tab list occupied only 3/4 of the screen height and I could reach even the first tab with the hand holding my phone.

Please either make my tabs nearer or make the list scrollable / movable so I can reach them easily.

Comment 1

[Nicholas Poon (redirect NI to [e-mail]) [:Nick]]

Hi!
Thanks for reporting this bug! We intentionally moved from a bottom sheet to a full screen fragment here but thank you for the feedback. We will take this into consideration

Comment 2

[JoshH]

I'm unsure how to add some weight to this bug so I'll just write my thoughts.

The full screen design really leaves those who prefer to interact with their phone on the bottom with a loss of ergonomic functionality. When you are stuck reaching to the top of the screen to do anything with the tabs, especially with a larger phone, you have a really poor experience overall. There are a lot of options to put toolbars on the top, the bottom, use single or double line arrangements, both sticky and slide-away which are appreciated. But there is no option or set of settings that let the user manage tabs from the lower half of the phone screen. Either allowing the tab strip UX to attach to the bottom or pinning tabs to the bottom of the screen (growing up) would be great for users like me and, I'm assuming, the original bug reporter..

Comment 3

[Noah Bond [:007]]

Thanks for filing this bug and the conversation! I think this raises a good UX consideration. Maybe we can explore having the tabs populate from the bottom-up when the Toolbar is set to the bottom position.

We'll be discussing this and other components of the redesign soon with our UX and Product partners.

Comment 4

[Mark]

Samsung Internet handles this pretty well: the tab list starts at the top of the screen, but you can drag down to pull the topmost tabs to where your thumb can reach.

Ie, there is about 50 mm of blank space above the tab list. When opening the tab manager the blank space is off the top of the screen. But you can drag down with your thumb to reveal the empty space and bring the tabs down to within thumb reach.

It's a feature of a lot of Samsung apps (Messages etc) it's nice. It makes handling lists one-handed much easier.

Comment 5

[Mark]

Attachment: Screen_Recording_20251212_071300_Samsung Internet Beta.mp4

Comment 6

[breakingspell]

(In reply to Nicholas Poon (redirect NI to [e-mail]) [:Nick] from comment #1)

We intentionally moved from a bottom sheet to a full screen fragment here

Hello, I don't see any other discussions regarding this particular design choice, so i'd like to direct attention to it specifically. Referencing https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1971400 and https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D255850

To me, this is the most crucial regression in the new tabs manager. Where many other mobile applications are only now migrating to a unified sliding dialog UX (where Firefox Fenix was ahead of the curve with it's previous design), this is a major step back.

Could we please provide some details on the design discussions that took place, specifically to replace the drawer with a fullscreen menu? I've combed Phabricator for related discussions and do not have a Figma account to view those links.

I fully appreciate the work being done on the new tabs manager and resolving long-standing bottom-sheet issues, but this top-level paradigm change is rough. I've been trying to restore the old UX code for the last day or two (from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1975314), but this isn't sustainable.