248562 - (Windows classic theme) Very hard to identify the active tab

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Doug Hockin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+

When you have multiple tabs open and look up at the tab bar, it's very hard to
visually identify the active tab.  There's just now enough visually different
between it and the other tabs to make it stand out.  On Mozilla the active tab
is much more obvious because there's a several pixel wide line extending from
the bottom of the active tab to both the left and right margins of the tab bar.
 You can visually follow that line from anywhere to the active tab very quickly.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Get several tabs open at once.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Hard to identify the active tab visually.

Expected Results:  
Should be easy to find the active tab.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 250778 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

WFM with recent 0.9+ builds

reporter, please try a more recent build.  The active tab now has an easily
identifiable orange line at the top of it.

Comment 3

[Mr. Moose]

I've just downloaded the nightly build and I don't see an orange line.  I see
that the active tab has the text in bold, which seems like a good idea.

However, the downside of this is that if the user has enough tabs open that the
text is obscured and all that is seen is a small page icon and a "...", the bold
part is very difficult to notice.  

IMHO, I still like the way Mozilla handles it (but keep the bold text).

Comment 4

[Bogdan Stroe]

(In reply to comment #2)
> WFM with recent 0.9+ builds
> 
> reporter, please try a more recent build.  The active tab now has an easily
> identifiable orange line at the top of it.

I can see the orange line, now that you mentioned it. Maybe it would be better
to put it under the tab's title, or maybe to put a background color for the head
of the active tab.

Comment 5

[Justin Watt]

i would suggest making the active tab lighter in color (or making all the
inactive tabs darker). i also don't see any orange lines in: Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

<tangent>
i wonder what it would look like if the active tab was white?

of course i'm only thinking that because the background of this page is white.
what if the tab absorbed the background color/image of the document? that would
be neat.
</tangent>

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** Bug 271136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Maybe some opacity over the tab icon?

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

This is pretty hard to "fix" because we're relying on the OS theme.  If your OS
theme has poor active/inactive tab appearance, that's going to suck in all apps
using native tabs.  If we were using non-native tabs, then we could do more, but
I'm not really an advocate of that.  Many GTK themes do a great job of tab
definition.  A number of third-party themes for XP also do that.  XP Luna's
orange line isn't necessarily enough for some users, and XP Classic isn't any
better.  However, that I'd consider more of a general OS issue that we don't
necessarily want to work around.  If you find that tab definition/usability is
suffering because of your OS theme, instead of a single app working around it,
its better for the user overall to push them to switch their OS settings.

Comment 9

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> If you find that tab definition/usability is
> suffering because of your OS theme, instead of a single app working around it,
> its better for the user overall to push them to switch their OS settings.

tabbrowser is a "special kind" of tabbar. Other windows doesn't have more than
6/7 tabs [in one line], doesn't get "..." instead of their title, and generally,
you won't be able to add tabs. So this isn't really an issue anywhere else.

While we should be pro-native-solutions, it isn't the best solution for
tabbrowsr. We already special case tabbrowser on mac - we use native tabs in any
other window, and "something else" in the browser window.

----
FYI Native tabs were dropped from Camino a month ago.

Comment 10

[Kevin Gerich]

On Mac OS X, you have an OS theme that doesn't change much except for the
highlight colors, so you can be reasonably certain of the OS appearance and
build something non-native to blend in. On Windows XP, you have Luna Blue,
Silver, Olive, Classic and there are tons of GTK theme designs as well..It just
isn't practical to come up with one non-native design to fit all these cases.

Also a minor point about Pinstripe: Mac Mozilla still draws old Jaguar-style
tabs. It is not consistent with the new Panther tab design. That fact made the
decision to go with a non-native tab design for Firefox easier.

Mano, I like the idea of dimming the inactive tab favicon (-moz-opacity: 0.5)
like we do in Pinstripe if it looks good.. but that won't really solve the
reporter's problem, as Mike said. Wontfix?

Comment 11

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

(In reply to comment #10)
 
> Mano, I like the idea of dimming the inactive tab favicon (-moz-opacity: 0.5)
> like we do in Pinstripe if it looks good.. but that won't really solve the
> reporter's problem, as Mike said. Wontfix?

First of all, the orginal report is pretty obselte, and reported against Qute.
Still, the first statement are still very true: "When you have multiple tabs
open and look up at the tab bar, it's very hard to
visually identify the active tab."

IMHO, some opacity for the favicon will turn out this issue, especailly when you
have 10+ tabs. In addition, it looks as it is the only thing we can do (if we
stay with natvie tabs).

Comment 12

[Prognathous]

Attachment: Mockup of a possible solution

This one is based on Justin Watt's "tangent" suggestion (see comment #5).

Prog.

Comment 13

[Prognathous]

Attachment: Another mockup

I'm attaching an alternative mockup. This one changes the look&feel of the
active tab to match the title-bar (either Classic or Luna).

Prog.

Comment 14

[Bryan]

Why not "dim" the inactive tabs?  I use the following code myself to do just that:

/* Change color of active tab */ 
tab{
   -moz-appearance: none !important; 
} 
tab[selected="true"] { 
   background-color: rgb(222,218,210) !important; 
   color: black !important; 
} 
 
/* Change color of normal tabs */ 
tab:not([selected="true"]) { 
   background-color: rgb(200,196,188) !important; 
   color: gray !important; 
}

This helps out alot!

Comment 15

[Bryan]

Attachment: What the below code actually looks like in XP Classic or Luna...

What the above code (comment 14) actually looks like in XP Classic or Luna...

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3542/ mentioned in Bug 356574 (a dup?) nicely addresses this annoying problem

Why didn't FF2's theme update do a better job on this problem?

Comment 17

[Joshua Nixon]

Suggest that this bug be widened to include Luna theme as well as Classic, especially in more recent builds.

Active tab MUCH harder to identify visually in FF2/Luna. Theme update really needs to address this issue. Active tabs in IE7 are much more visually distinct than in FF2, and active tab in FF1.x is still easier to see than in FF2. The theme update seems like a regression in this instance rather than an improvement.

Comment 18

[deleteaccount]

Although the original report is quite old, I will note that I just upgraded from an old version 1 of firefox to 2.0.0.7 and I am struck by how hard it is to find the active tab when a number of tabs are present.  I asked in the support forum, and apparently there was a fix for the tab colors, but it does not work in version 2 as the background is now an image.

Is there some way for the user to replace this image, say with a white background for the active tab?

I am not a theme maven, but I did install something or other that sounded like it would give the old appearance, but does not (wine-something?_

Comment 19

[Bryan]

This is resolved in FF3.

Comment 20

[Adam Guthrie]

->WORKSFORME