647714 - browser.tabs.autohide hides menu button as well when only one tab

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Josh Triplett]

Filing this bug with a high severity, because it can get a user into a state they can't easily recover from, even by restarting the browser.

The preference browser.tabs.autohide (exposed in the UI as Preferences->Tabs->"Always show the tab bar") determines whether the tab bar appears with only one tab visible.  With this preference set to true, the tab bar only appears when the user has two or more tabs open.

If the user has the menu bar disabled, such that the menu button appears on the tab bar, then when the tab bar disappears, the menu button disappears with it.  That also removes access to Preferences, so if the user toggled the preference that way, they can't get back to the preferences dialog to undo it.  Thus, the user either has to go to about:config and manually fix the underlying preference, or open a new tab (via keyboard, middle-click, or the context menu) to make the tab bar appear.  If the user doesn't know how to do either of those things already, they can't recover.

This also hides any other controls on the tab bar, which may prove sub-optimal now that toolbar customization works with the tab bar.

(Also notable: if you hide other toolbars via customization, then this situation results in no toolbars whatsoever, and thus no ability to access the customize dialog either.)

I originally encountered this issue when experimenting with Firefox to try to configure it to use only windows rather than tabs, for use with a tabbed window manager.  Unfortunately, customization does not allow moving the menu button to the navigation bar (or anywhere else); see bug 180164 for that.

Comment 1

[Notlost]

this doesn't happen with windows 7 and the latest aurora. the menu button is still visible.

Comment 2

[Josh Triplett]

Still a problem here with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0a2) Gecko/20110615 Firefox/6.0a2

Comment 3

[Artem Karpenko]

I can confirm this problem with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0. Actually came here because of this. I'd suggest that if user selects to hide menu bar and show menu button then option for "always show tab bar" should be automatically enabled and vice versa. Or show menu button to the left of "Back" button when there is only one tab and tab bar isn't shown. Or well you can probably think of better solution.

Comment 4

[Artem Karpenko]

Attachment: Screenshot of browser window having no menu button

Comment 5

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

Marking as fixed since this ability is removed in the current Nightly entirely. Even the about:config entry either won't appear on new Firefox profiles or simply won't do anything and will always appear as user set.

Marking as resolved->fixed.