359133 - close button on tab disappears when number of tabs exceed 8 or more

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 358949

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Pradeep Kumar]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

The X close button on tab disappears when the number of tabs exceed 8 or more. This happens only for all tabs except the last one which always shows the X close button. This is observed in the new default theme.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox. Make sure it is in default theme.
2. Keep pressing CTRL+T or New Tab to keep creating tabs atleast 9 or 10.
3. If u yet dint notice the close buttons missing, close 3 tabs and again open 3 more tabs.

Actual Results:  
1. When the 9th tab is opened the close buttons on all tabs except the last one(the rightmost tab) disappears.
2. If you select the tabs with the missing X buttons the X appears again for that tab alone.
3. If you close the tabs to reach the 8 threshold all the close buttons reappear.

Expected Results:  
Allow the user to configure the supposedly 8 threshold or make the threshold automatically flexible depending upon available screen space(resolution dependent??).

This seems to be a intentional design to handle space on the tab bar title when there are a lot of tabs which is agreeable. But in case of 8 tabs there is still enough space to show the X button. At least for my 1280X1024 resolution.

Comment 1

[Anders Conbere]

this can be changed in about:config and is by design.  Feel free to file a feature request to add the option into the options dialog.

Comment 2

[Pradeep Kumar]

can you please mention the setting in about:config?

Comment 3

[Anders Conbere]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth should explain the behaviour.