533930 - Thunderbird, like Firefox, should have a configuration setting for hiding the tab bar when only one tab is open.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[eric raeburn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091204 Thunderbird/3.0

Firefox has the "Always show the tab bar" setting.  It would be nice if TB had that too, because vertical screen space is a precious commodity on today's height-challenged displays, especially on smaller laptops.  When, for example, the user's Inbox is the only open tab, it would be nice to hide the tab bar--it consumes a lot of screen height but provides negligible value when there is only one tab.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Close all tabs but one on a small laptop and note how much empty vertical space is consumed by the tab, space which could be better used, say for the list of messages, or for the contents of a message.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

That option is already there, but as a hidden mail.tabs.autoHide preference setting. In contrast, Firefox has that option in the "Tabs" pane of their options, thus adding a respective checkbox to Thunderbird would match that.

Comment 2

[Charles]

+1

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Confirming RFE, also a topic on GS. Should be easy to add in time for 3.1 if wanted; a checkbox would fit into the Advanced > Reading & Display preferences as TB doesn't have a "Tabs" option category.

Bryan, any thoughts?

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Right now I believe the issue has been about space in the preferences UI.  If we got something like bug 456587 (use firefox style color chooser) fixed then we would easily have the space in the Display tab for a small tab preference section.  I'd give a ui-r+ if we had that other bug done, and that one should be as easy as this one.

Also, I feel like this bug has to be a dupe however I couldn't find anything in a quick search.

Comment 5

[Jérôme Bouat]

While we are waiting for a simple checkbox into the preference dialog which will allow to set the "always show the tab bar" feature, I think we need a default behaviour which hide it.

Maybe we could set the below property with the below value by default:
mail.tabs.autoHide=True