434127 - Add another overflow menu on the LEFT side when there are more open tabs than will fit on screen

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, enhancement)

Description

[steve]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080409 Camino/1.6 (like Firefox/2.0.0.14)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080409 Camino/1.6 (like Firefox/2.0.0.14)

Add another overflow menu on the LEFT side when there are more open tabs than will fit on screen.
Right menu adds good functionality.  Give the same on the left.  Scrolling back to tab I is slow and unnecessary.
Thanks.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
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Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I'm pretty sure we decided not to do this in one of the "make tabbed browsing full of awesome" bugs, but I don't remember which one. As I recall, the main argument against it is the clutter factor, and changing the default location of the cursor in the popup menu on the right as part of bug 376930 is probably going to solve this at least somewhat.

Comment 2

[Stuart Morgan]

Yes, we deliberately chose to have one menu with everything, rather than two with just the overflow on each side, because it means that you don't have to remember which side a tab is on in order to find it. And having two controls that both have the complete menu is just confusing.

Comment 3

[steve]

Thanks for the reply. I get the logic of that decision.  Now consider
the following which prioritizes speed in a particular tab application,
rather than the neatness of the tool:

As a visual/3D-spatial person, I find the horizontal distribution of
the tabs helpful in doing quick comparisons among pages, for example,
where choosing with a single click-on-tab is instant, while drop down
menus require more steps and make the comparisons slower.

I'd like to be able to, say, shift-click on a tab in order to make it
the leftmost in the horizontal array.  I assume there's a logic to
where a tab - that you've chosen from the drop down menu - falls in
that array, but I'm not clear on what it is.

Alternatively, the strategies could be combined so that choosing a tab
from a left dropdown makes that tab the leftmost horizontally, while
choosing from the right make it the rightmost.

Your thoughts on this?

Steve

Comment 4

[Stuart Morgan]

Please read the bugzilla etiquette guide; re-opening a WONTFIX bug because you disagree with the decision is not appropriate. The decision not to add a second menu has been made.