211620 - closing last (only) tab closes tab bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 154335

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Craig Reynolds]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

When I close the last remaining tab, the whole tab bar disappears, making it
hard to click on the "Open a new tab" button.  

I have my tabbed browsing preferences set to NOT "Hide the tab bar when only one
tab is open".  I also have it set so that new tabs initially contain my home
page.  (How come that Preference is under Navigator and not mentioned under
Tabbed Browsing?)  I see the "disappearing tab bar" problem when I want to flush
the current tab (which say, has lots of irrelevant history I want to discard)
and open a new "clean" tab.  I can work around this by opening a new tab THEN
closing the old one, but to me it feels more natural to do it in the other order.

I am not certain if the current behavior is a bug or a feature.  If the latter,
consider this an RFE that there be a checkbox for "Never EVER hide the tab bar,
even if there are ZERO tabs open" (or words to that effect :-).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. use Tabbed browsing
2. close the last (only) tab
3. Tab bar dissappears

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

What exactly do you expect to happen when you close the last tab, pray tell?

And yes, this behavior is purposeful -- the other option is to disable the close
button when only one tab is open.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

You can find near everything in bugzilla

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 154335 ***

Comment 3

[Craig Reynolds]

As I was writing this, Matti dupped it to Bug 154335, which is WONTFIX.
Probably it will not surprise you that I disagree:


> What exactly do you expect to happen when you close the last tab,
> pray tell?

Well what *I* expected (your expectations may vary) was for the tab to
close (leaving a blank browser window) and nothing else.  Specifically, 
that the tab bar NOT close.  From your response I take it the "design
philosophy" is that the tab bar serves no purpose other than to allow
selection between MULTIPLE tabs.  Hence it is unneeded if there are 0
or 1 tabs open.

The Preference option to hide the tab bar when only one tab is open is
in line with this philosophy, but that fact that it can be turned off
suggests that people have different ideas about how this should work.

Another perfectly valid philosophy is that the tab bar is there to
provide a locus for all "tab manipulation" operations, such as closing
tabs, or creating new tabs.  In this interpretation, the existence
(hidden-ness) of the tab bar is unrelated to the number of open tabs.
Hence my request for a mode where the tab bar would never hide.

> And yes, this behavior is purposeful -- the other option is to
> disable the close button when only one tab is open.

On the third hand, you could (as now) leave the close button enabled
when any tabs are open and allow it to close the last tab, leaving a
blank browser.

Comment 4

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

> that fact that it can be turned off

that might have to do with the fact that some people don't want to use tabs

Comment 5

[Craig Reynolds]

>> that fact that it can be turned off
> that might have to do with the fact that some people don't want to use tabs

Good point.  My theory is that there are (at least) three kinds of 
people when it comes to tabbed browsing and the tab bar:

(1) those that NEVER want to see the tab bar
(2) those that want the tab bar when there are two or more tabs open
(3) those that ALWAYS want to see the tab bar

I started as a #1 but am now a #3.