995171 - Clumsy tab selection when the tabbar is overflowed with pinned tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 583299

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Cornel Ionce [:noni] [Hubs QA]]

Attachment: pinned_tabs.jpg

STR:
1. Open Firefox
2. Open several tabs and pin them until the tab bar overflows.

Results:
The remaining opened tabs cannot be scrolled using the "<" and ">" arrows.
The only way to see them is by clicking the "List all tabs" button.
Also, there is no option to pin other tabs.

I'd suggest making a width limit for the pinned tabs and adding navigation arrows.

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hm, I'm not sure we'd want to add another set of scrollbox arrows just for the pinned tabs.

Something like tab groups might be a better solution for this (I suspect) rare, use case.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I think we should just chuck the pinned tabs under the scrollbox bus for the other tabs once there's non-pinned tabs which are overflowing. That kind of defeats the point of the pinned tabs, but equally, I'm not sure what else people would expect here - having two adjacent scrollboxes would just be weird and unwieldy, not to mention hard to implement.

However, I also think this is enough of an edge-case that wontfix wouldn't be wholly inappropriate.

Comment 4

[alex_mayorga]

Attachment: tab-bar-under-min-max-close.PNG

Coming from bug 1041714 and bug 1042928 which Gijs considers duplicates of this one I would lay out what bugs me on the current overflow behavior:

- A navigator of nothing <|> can appear on windows that are not wide enough, see https://bug1041714.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8459754

- Aforementioned navigator of nothing <|> over imposes on top of "New tab" + and "List all tabs", see https://bug1042928.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8461093

My proposed expected behavior is the navigator of nothing <|> is hidden and only "New tab" + and "List all tabs" remain in the tab bar when the windows are not wide enough.

Perhaps the width of the Firefox window should have a minimum set a tad wider than the current <Back> + <Site Identity Button> + <Awesome bar> + >> + <Hamburger menu>

I propose it to be whatever is larger of the above or # of App tabs + "New tab" + "List all tabs"

On bug 1041714 comment 7 Gijs argued:
> I've explained that that isn't possible - bits of the buttons would get
> overlaid by the window controls (_[]X to use your ascii art).

(ditto for the tabs themselves, btw)

Could we afford the 5 pixels so the overlay won't happen (see attached)?

Comment 5

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #3)
> I think we should just chuck the pinned tabs under the scrollbox bus for the
> other tabs once there's non-pinned tabs which are overflowing. That kind of
> defeats the point of the pinned tabs, but equally, I'm not sure what else
> people would expect here - having two adjacent scrollboxes would just be
> weird and unwieldy, not to mention hard to implement.
> 
> However, I also think this is enough of an edge-case that wontfix wouldn't
> be wholly inappropriate.

I agree that a WONTFIX would probably be ok here since this is a self-inflicted edge-case; also I don't think we need to encourage ever possible case of overflow. Some things simply won't scale well, and that's ok.

If I had to propose a "fix" for this though I would say that we should always show at least one tab in the overflow scrollbox and then do as you suggest by cutting off any pinned tabs that don't fit.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Good news, it's a dupe!