349219 - Tabs do not match appearance in mockups and appear ugly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Alex R.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060817 BonEcho/2.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060817 BonEcho/2.0b1

Over at the MozillaZine forums there has been quite a bit of whining about how terrible the new tabstrip looks. A lot of the problems are simply glitches, but I believe there's one major problem as well.

Previously, inactive tabs were darker and closer to the style of the mockups at the wiki page (http://wiki.mozilla.org/FX2_Visual_Update/Default_Theme_Update). However, some said this decreased the readability of the text (as the text was made transparent as well as the tab itself). However, the new, lighter versions also look uglier. I feel a good compromise between the two would be to decrease the opacity of the background tabs but to increase that of the text in the tabs, so that it is readable. This is, in fact, what is depicted in the original mockups, and looks very nice.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Peter Kasting]

AFAIK, something about XUL prevents us from changing the opacity of the tab images without changing the text opacity?

A simpler fix here would be to not use an opacity value for background/hover/active, and rather user images that have different alpha-blending characteristics.  Assuming that's possible.

CCing Ben as I think he had some thoughts about the current appearance vs. the mockups.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Attachment: screenshot comparison

The browser on top is the presentation, the browser below is the latest branch.

Comment 3

[hhh]

*** Bug 349190 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Worcester12345]

voting for it from this bug:
Bugzilla Bug 349190 Not enough color contrast between active and inactive tabs

Comment 5

[Worcester12345]

Due to the lack of distinction in the tabs here, I have been forced to go looking at themes to try to fix it. I'm sticking with 1.5.0.x until this can be fixed.

Comment 6

[José Jeria]

The new look of the tabs makes it difficult to see what tab is selected. Maybe the selected tab could have a higher height than the other. They all seem to have the same height now.

Comment 7

[Worcester12345]

Bugzilla Bug 251198 "Bright, clear focus appearance for HTML content on Win/GTK platforms" would fix this bug.

Edit: It wouldn't let me mark bug 251198 under "depends on".

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Bugzilla Bug 251198 "Bright, clear focus appearance for HTML content on Win/GTK
> platforms" would fix this bug.

No, it wouldn't. Bug 251198 is about HTML content and :focus. A selected tab is neither HTML nor necessarily focused. And even if the proposal in bug 251198 applied to XUL's tab[selected="true"], it wouldn't be near to the mockups, leaving a number of issues this bug addresses.

Comment 9

[Peter Kasting]

Possible dupe of bug 349163.  (They're not exactly the same bug, so maybe one depends on the other.)

Comment 10

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Spun off bug 350139 to handle replacing the tabstrip images with separate sets to avoid opacity issues.  (Re: comment 1 its the way opacity works in CSS, even in HTML)

Marking this one invalid in favour of the other bug, since what's left here is pretty much bashing and ratholey.

Comment 11

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> in favour of the other bug

It's a duplicate then, right? Not that I care, but if I were the reporter, I probably would.

Comment 12

[Worcester12345]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Spun off bug 350139 to handle replacing the tabstrip images with separate sets
> to avoid opacity issues.  (Re: comment 1 its the way opacity works in CSS, even
> in HTML)
> 
> Marking this one invalid in favour of the other bug, since what's left here is
> pretty much bashing and ratholey.
> 

It says "the other bug" is fixed, but it sure doesn't look it from here on Windows XP Professional.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060909 BonEcho/2.0b2 ID:2006090903