497398 - Implement Animation for Tab Creation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 543206

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Spiewak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b99) Gecko/20090605 Firefox/3.5b99
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b99) Gecko/20090605 Firefox/3.5b99

It would be extremely nice if Firefox had a subtle animation when opening a new tab.  A good examples of this sort of thing is Chrome, which has a ~500ms animation showing the new tab handle "growing" into place.  Given that Firefox's tabs are at the bottom of the toolbar rather than the top, I believe that a "sliding" animation would be more appropriate.  Thus, the animation would be primarily horizontal, showing the new tab either sliding out from behind the others or stretching to full width.  This effect should be both fast and subtle, serving only as visual polish and not detracting from the time-to-live for the tab.  Perhaps a better animation length would be ~200ms, which would be fast enough to be pleasing to the eye but not slow enough to slow down interaction.

On a related vein, when enough tabs have been opened to merit lateral shrinkage (about 6 tabs on a 1440px width window), the animation should not only "expand" the new tab handle but also "shrink" the old ones to their appropriate size.  Similarly, closing a tab should have the corresponding inverse animation.

In general, tabs should *never* instantly take on a particular size; all changes should be fluid.  With most UIs, this conveys the illusion of superior interface speed without actually optimizing anything.  Just a thought, but this should probably be configurable through a config property to avoid annoying the folks who dislike such things.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

there is something like this, on moving tabs. can't find it now, but there are a lot of bugs on tab animations.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=Firefox&content=tab+animation

Comment 2

[José Jeria]

This bug should be duped to bug 543206, which has a patch