949328 - [Usability] Please add an option to always show tabs

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 944925

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Theme and Visual Design, defect)

Description

[Pesho Goshev]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.34 Safari/534.24

Steps to reproduce:

Steps to reproduce:
1) Start Firefox for Android
2) Open a website (e.g. do a Google search) and scroll within the page
3) Using long press on a link open one or more links in new tab
4) Now, how do you navigate to the new tabs opened?


Actual results:

In order to navigate to the newly opened tabs you need to:
1) Scroll a but up, so that the tiny button at the top left with number of opened tabs to show up
 Here is the first usability issue with the current UI - you lose your position on the current tab
2) Then you need to tap this top left button to show the list of tabs
3) Only now (after a scroll and tap) you can navigate to the newly opened tab(s)
 Here is the second usability issue - tab navigation is overcomplicated


Expected results:

Please add a setting to always show tabs.

On a 7 inch tablet I really don't need that much the space that tabs take, but I use a lot of tabs and I need faster tab navigation instead.
I liked it much better in the older versions (around v.15 or so) when tabs were always shown.

Another option could be to always show the address bar and the tabs button, this way at least you won't have the first usability issue described above

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

In Aurora (v.28) and in Nightly (v.29) we've added (in bug 944925) - 'Hide title bar when scrolling' as a customization option under Display settings in our browser. This toggle disables the toolbar from hiding and lets you always have access.

Comment 2

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Thanks for filing a bug Pesho. 

Just wanted to add to Aaron's comments -- there is also work underway to provide the ability to “pin” the tab bar open on tablets — bug 817728 — which will make frequent tab switching more comfortable in the current interface. 

The UX team is in the midst of a larger tablet refresh that revisits how we do tabs, but that probably won't see the light of day until later in 2014 -- hopefully these changes will satisfy your needs in the mean time :)

Comment 3

[Pesho Goshev]

Thanks Aaron and Ian! Closing this big as a duplicate of bug 944925.