540125 - Provide a way for extensions and themes to visually indicate newly opened related tabs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[u88484]

Extensions and themes need a way to visually indicate newly opened related tabs.  Currently newly opened related tabs could end up being opened way down the tab strip if the user opens a bunch of links from the parent tab and there is no way to visually indicate where that new tab opened.  I run into this all the time when browsing forums, bug links and news sites.  I'm constantly ctrl+clicking all kinds of links from a main page of a website and often lose exactly where the last tab I opened was because that is sometimes the page that I want to get to first.

Something needs to be exposed so extensions and themes can make use of something like:

#content tab([new]) {
color: #005500 !important;
border-bottom: 2px solid #00BB00 !important;
}

I know there is tab:not([selected]) but that is not want I'm looking for as that will color each and every tab that I have not focused.

I'd really like Firefox to do something like IE does and color newly opened tabs but I'll leave that bug for a later date if this one is accepted.

Comment 1

[u88484]

I think the correct terminology I'm try to suggest is to add a new pseudo-class for the tab selector.

Comment 2

[u88484]

See also bug 487242, a regression of not being able to distinguish between unvisited tabs, visited tabs, and the selected tab.

Comment 3

[David Regev]

I’d like to provide a more specific use case for this.

Say I have three tabs open:
    A b c
(where capitalization indicates the active tab). Now, if I open three new background tabs, I get:
    A d e f b c
This can get confusing, since the only way to know where the next tab will open is to remember. The solution is to set a property for each tab in the active tab group. That would allow those tabs to be styled, such as by a different background colour. So, in our example, I start off with the following tabs:
    [A] b c
(where the square brackets indicate the active tab group). Opening three new tabs yields the following:
    [A d e f] b c
This makes it clear that all the highlighted tabs are related and, more importantly, it is now obvious where the next tab will be opened: right after f.
If I now switch to d, the active tab group resets to just one tab again:
    a [D] e f b c
Again, where the next new tab will appear remains obvious (after D).

Note that this is different from indicating unread tabs. Also, this is simply about adding a property to all related tabs so that others can style them, not (yet) about incorporating such styles into Firefox proper.