501803 - There is no close button on tab when only one tab is open

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 456405

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[valaszoljnekem]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 jbth Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 jbth Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Open Firefox, open at least 2 tabs and observe that each one has a close button.
Now close all tabs but one, and observe that close button has disappeared.
If a new tab is opened (so two are displayed) the close button appears again.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox, open at least 2 tabs and observe that each one has a close button.
2. Now close all tabs but one, and observe that close button has disappeared.
3. If a new tab is opened (so two are displayed) the close button appears again.
Actual Results:  
Close button is sometimes visible sometimes not.

Expected Results:  
Close button is always visible.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

the last tab will close the window and that is the reason why the tab close button is gone for the last tab.

Comment 2

[valaszoljnekem]

I've read comments in bug 456405 and still not agree with missing close button.

Closing the last tab doesn't close the main window in my browser. 
Even if it did close the browser there should be a close button, because without it the UI is inconsistent, and as others pointed out there are cases when I do want to close the last tab and have a fresh one instead.

The power of Firefox _was_ that it was built for smart people. 
Now that you've started to add features with the least smart users in mind FF becomes like IE, i.e. wants to be everyone's browser - which might be a good choice from business point of view but not for quality. 
This will not work because you'll never be able to satisfy all the users, eventually you'll have to choose between the "smart" users who can say the difference between a tab and the main window and the less smart users who initially may think an X in the corner closes the window but after a few uses they'll also know the difference. 
MDI has been around for long and there's no point changing it's behavior though other apps also have this "closing last doc closes the app" behavior - but FF shouldn't copy other apps because if it becomes the same there will be no reason to choose FF in favor of Safari for example. Not so long ago FF was in front of other browsers and others copied FF features, why did you stop this and started to copy other browsers?
I was a very big fan of FF, but to be onest it becomes very much like IE, it has useless and annoying features and is slow (at least versions 1.5-3.1 were).