628418 - Ability to pin tabs

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, enhancement)

Description

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Chrome has a feature which allows you to "pin" tabs, which does the following:

  * Makes the tab only a favicon
  ** Removes the title from the tab
  ** Removes the close button from the tab
  ** Size of tab is 16x16 plus adequate spacing
  * Moves the tab to the far left of the tab bar
  ** New pinned tabs go to right of other pinned tabs
  * "Freezes" tab in place (it can't be dragged and dropped, except out of
    the browser into a new window)
  * Opens links from other domains (nay, subdomains) in a new window

I'd love for this feature to be ported to Camino, with or without the last item. It's pretty great for things like a Gmail tab, which I use frequently.

As far as tab overflow goes... I can see us doing it one of two ways, both of which seem acceptable:

  1. Freeze pinned tabs regardless of where the tab bar is in its overflow.
  2. Pinned tabs are left-most no matter what. Scrolling right makes them 
     disappear.

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

For reference, the Firefox version of this feature (which is different) had meta bug 551849 and impl bug 563730; the follow-ups/regressions are useful to see the sorts of additional detail work that may be required ("Close Other Tabs" context menu, session restoration, etc.).

Comment 2

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Smokey asked me how one closes this tab. Two ways:

  1. Unpin the tab and click the close button.
  2. cmd-w. Key commands still work on pinned tabs.

Comment 3

[philippe (part-time)]

a couple of thoughts:

1. opening a tabgroup should not blow away a pinned tab. That doesn't happen in Chrome as far as I can simulate - but Chrome doesn't know the concept of tabgroup. But I've seen it fail randomly in the Minefield build I have – fail=pinned tab is replaced - using the 'open all in tabs')

2. Should opening a URL replace the pinned tab if it is the active tab (both Chrome and Minefield overwrite the pinned tab, I think this is conceptually wrong) ?

Comment 4

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> 2. Should opening a URL replace the pinned tab if it is the active tab (both
> Chrome and Minefield overwrite the pinned tab, I think this is conceptually
> wrong) ?

Conceptually wrong for Firefox's idea of "app tabs", maybe. But I don't think it's wrong at all for the idea of "pinned" tabs. In Chrome, these aren't meant to be full app tabs, just space saving tabs for frequently used things. I don't see any problem with replacing the URL of one.

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

(Closing this out so it’s not on my dashboard.)