459642 - Tabs reduce to favicon when too many tabs are open to fit on the screen

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Scott]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3

When there are more tabs open that will fit on the screen, have an option to reduce these tabs down to their favicon (remove the caption from each tab). When you mouseover a tab when it is reduced, it should add the caption back into that tab and perhaps the tabs on either side. This would allow for faster access to tabs, rather than going to the drop-down menu or using hotkeys to navigate between tabs.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Damian Shaw [Quan]]

How would it expand while not making it difficult to accurately mouse over nearby tabs? (Because the expanded tab is now covering the area where the nearby non-expanded tabs should be using, so when you mouse over a nearby tab your old de-expands and the whole tab bar moves).

i.e how would it not break Fitts's Law?

Comment 2

[Scott]

(In reply to comment #1)
> How would it expand while not making it difficult to accurately mouse over
> nearby tabs? (Because the expanded tab is now covering the area where the
> nearby non-expanded tabs should be using, so when you mouse over a nearby tab
> your old de-expands and the whole tab bar moves).
> 
> i.e how would it not break Fitts's Law?

Hey Damian,
My thought was to have it like a "dock" on the Mac. When a tab expanded, it would move the others out with it, preventing overlap. You can find an example of how the Mac dock works on youtube or possibly on Apple's website.

Hope this clarifies my concept a bit better :)

Comment 3

[Damian Shaw [Quan]]

I don't use a mac, but from pictures and your description it sounds like the
Mac Dock breaks Fitts's Law, but not that seriously.

But there's more pragmatical problems with tabs than there are with the dock.
For example the Dock is centred so it can 'expand' freely to the side, with
tabs you might have a hard left for the first tabs and then tabs that go on
indefinitely. If you click on a tab and it expands, it has to push all the tabs
right of it yet further right. If you then click on the tab immediately to the
right of it, that tab expands and the previous one shrinks, moving tabs all
around the place and more importantly the close tab buttons attached to them
just for the sake of selecting that tab. This would pose serious accessibility
problems.

There is a bug to add animation to tab D&D: bug 455694

But this really isn't the place to propose such UI design change unless you can
convince some developer it's a good idea. You might have better luck over at
mozilla.dev.apps.firefox which can be accessed through Google groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/topics

But try and think about accessibility, not everyone has good eyesight when
using a computer or other impediments can cause it very hard to track moving
functionality. That's why current tabs are fixed width, even when you select
them and the close tab button appears. But hey, maybe if you think through your
idea a bit more you can come up with a better idea than we have now :).

Comment 4

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs which are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, have not been changed for 500 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or later, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the issue, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the status to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 5

[kausar chaudhary]

ml;ml;kopkop