986825 - Close button not visible sooner on background tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 491291

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[bogomip]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140318013849

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox auto-update.


Actual results:

After Firefox auto-update the browser background tabs are missing the close button [x].



Expected results:

For usability reasons backgroud tabs should have close buttons:

Assume you are opening many tabs while browsing. Only one tab is active at a time.
Assume the currently opened tab contains information you've been looking for.
Now you want to close some of the tabs opened earlier since you do not want to have
too many tabs with less interesing content open.

BEFORE UPDATE:
 1. While reading move the mouse over the tab's close button.
 2. Klick the close button. The tabs closes in backgroud without distracting the user.

AFTER UPDATE:
 1. Move the mouse over the tab that should be closed.
 2. Stop reading and klick on the tab to activate it. The missing close button appears.
 3. Klick the close button. Another tab opens.
 4. Find the tab you've been currently reading in. Notice this may take a while since
    you have many tabs open and, according to issue 986817 it now requires more time
    to visually gather the tab of interest.
 5. Move the mouse over the tab you want to reactivate.
 6. Klick on the tab to active it.
 7. Find the passage in the text where you stopped reading.
 8. Continue reading.


Ref.:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986817

Comment 1

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

If you have fewer tabs open, the close icon still appears on background tabs, correct? We stop showing the close icon on background tabs when the tabs get narrower than a certain amount. We could possibly adjust the threshold if it regressed in 29 but someone would have to confirm that was the case (with data showing the dimensions) and then consult UX.

Comment 2

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

There's an add-on that, amongst other things, shows the close button regardless of tab size.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readable-and-closable-tabs/

I'm currently giving that an extended try to see if it would make sense to switch to that as the default behavior.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

As far as I know, the tab size at which we stop showing close buttons on background tabs is based on a study done by IBM that showed how users would increasingly often hit the close buttons accidentally when attempting to select background tabs as they become smaller.

Australis didn't affect this, as far as I can tell.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> As far as I know, the tab size at which we stop showing close buttons on
> background tabs is based on a study done by IBM

... or by the NASA, according to bug 851043.

Comment 5

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

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #4)
> (In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> > As far as I know, the tab size at which we stop showing close buttons on
> > background tabs is based on a study done by IBM
> 
> ... or by the NASA, according to bug 851043.

I wonder if that research is still valid today. I couldn't find the original article, but I imagine that years of using computers and playing shooters would impact this metric. I've heard many (anecdotal) complaints about the disappearing buttons, so I'm wondering if by hiding them we are fixing a problem that doesn't exist (anymore).

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (on PTO Apr 16-23) from comment #5)
> (In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #4)
> > (In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> > > As far as I know, the tab size at which we stop showing close buttons on
> > > background tabs is based on a study done by IBM
> > 
> > ... or by the NASA, according to bug 851043.
> 
> I wonder if that research is still valid today. I couldn't find the original
> article, but I imagine that years of using computers and playing shooters
> would impact this metric.

There already was a generation of experienced computer users, long-time shooter players etc. in 2006 (when the per-tab close button was introduced with the present behavior). I don't think this was much different from today. The problem is that we can't just cater for the most experienced and enabled class of users.

> I've heard many (anecdotal) complaints about the disappearing buttons,

They surface every now and then in bugzilla and have done so for years. The bottom line is that users (understandably) don't see why we sometimes hide close buttons and think it's a bug, but that doesn't mean our reasons are invalid.

Comment 7

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

Dão, do you know where the original research is available?

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (on PTO Apr 16-23) from comment #7)
> Dão, do you know where the original research is available?

I have no idea. mconnor might know.

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

It was Google, not NASA.  I don't think I still have the study data, this was... 2005.  Even my email packrat tendencies haven't served me here.  I'm not sure if I ever got a PDF type thing, or if we just got a presentation from the Google UX researcher who did it.

The tl;dr was that we studied a bunch of stuff using eye tracking, and measured things like time to switch tabs, accidental closure rates.

Key takeaways:

* Accidental closure rates jumped by more than an order of magnitude when we got below 120px (from 1/1000 to something like 1/50, but it's been a while).
* Tab labels are really important, and below a certain width users were significantly slower at tab switching + had higher error rates (i.e. wrong tab from a similar bar)

So, why 140px, rather than 120px?  Basically, the close button + padding made the label too small to be useful below that point.  We didn't have a great overflow/tab search story, so we caved a bit on min-width, but I was never really happen with that. (tl;dr all of the options kinda sucked)