343681 - tab overflow behavior wrong - should not crop tabs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

(spun off from bug 343674)

The current tab overflow behavior is wrong. We should not crop the tabs when scrolling. It makes the tab a difficult target and is visually unappealing. 

If it's been decided that scrolling is the least worst solution and so we're going with it, then we should scroll full tabs. When scrolling, we should scroll a full tab into view with each click of the scroll button. If a user resizes the window, we should calculate the largest whole number of tabs we can fit at that size and use that number.

Comment 1

[Bryan]

I wholeheartedly agree! I'm finding these new tabbar changes clunky and hard to get used to.  This change will certainly help with things!

~B

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Need a decision and some alternatives for beta2. Marking uiwanted as well so I can remember to look at it later.

Comment 3

[ronin.achilles]

I guess what we need to do is basically fit the next smaller number of tabs if a tab is cropped i.e. If there are 15 and a half tabs shown on the tab bar, just expand 15 tabs to fill the tab-bar space and put the 'half tab' into the overflow area.

Comment 4

[Peter Kasting]

Yep, this is our thinking on bug 343251 as well, which is becoming the tracking bug for the b2 implementation.  Or at least, we know we should never show partial tabs on the left.  It *might* make sense to show a partial tab on the right, but I'm very cautious about that; I need to see it in action with the rest of the solution on that bug.

Marking depends on that bug.

Comment 5

[John Mellor (Jomel)]

Hum, this could be quite hard to implement unfortunately. Tabs don't seem to respond well when given fractional widths, so you'd have to manually set some tabs to be a pixel wider or thinner in order to keep the total width constant (hence preventing cropping). And the alternative, reimplementing the whole thing by collapsing off-screen tabs, is even worse!

Comment 6

[ronin.achilles]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Hum, this could be quite hard to implement unfortunately. Tabs don't seem to
> respond well when given fractional widths, so you'd have to manually set some
> tabs to be a pixel wider or thinner in order to keep the total width constant
> (hence preventing cropping). And the alternative, reimplementing the whole
> thing by collapsing off-screen tabs, is even worse!
> 

I am not a programmer so I may be way off the mark here, but this 'seems' to have been implemented in IE7. I was just having a look at it. IE7 does not crop Tabs on either side. Even when one re-sizes the window, it adjusts the number of visible tabs to ensure that none of the tabs are cropped.

Comment 7

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Right, but IE7 doesn't use XUL widgets.

I don't think the partial tabs are a bad thing, since it makes it extra obvious that there is more than is onscreen.  Its also something that would be a pain to implement properly, as Jomel points out.

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Discussed further with beltzner, the partial tabs are a strong indicator for overflow, and we want to keep that in place.