941096 - Australis tabs are too eager to grab mouse-clicks - difficult to move the browser window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 887397

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: screenshot showing mouse pointer just outside a tab, but treated as inside

My Nightly recently updated to an Australis-enabled build, and I've been noticing a frustrating behavior of the new tabs: they leave too little of the window title-bar available to be clicked and dragged, so that when I want to move a browser window, I usually find that I've missed the narrow magic strip, and just activated (and begun to drag) a tab instead.

I think there are several aspects to this, all contributing to a UX that doesn't quite feel comfortable:

(1) The area of the title bar that can be used to drag the window is pretty narrow, so that clicking it requires excessive precision.

(2) There's no visible dividing line between the inactive tabs (except when the mouse is actually over one of them) and the remainder of the title bar, making it more difficult to know where to aim.

(3) The tabs seem to "steal" mouse clicks even if the pointer is slightly outside the visible boundary of the tab. The attached screenshot shows that even though the tip of the mouse pointer is clearly *above* the edge of the tab, it's still being treated as "in" the tab, and a click here will actually go to the tab, not the window titlebar. This further diminishes the already-narrow strip that's available for window dragging.

Comment 1

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Point 3 will be fixed when bug 934915 will be worked on.

Comment 2

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

This is actually not a regression, current Fx does the same thing. Current Fx title bar simply has more space to click on and avoid this bug.

Comment 3

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

The issues 1 and 3 should be fixed in bug 887397.
Issue 2 sounds like a wontfix to me.