Closed Bug 324470 Opened 19 years ago Closed 18 years ago

Active tab being wider than other tabs makes it hard to switch tabs

Categories

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

x86
All
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: ispiked, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

(Keywords: regression)

Since the landing of bug 308396, the active tab is made wider in order that there's more room for the close button. When one uses a lot of tabs, this tends to get sort of ugly. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open up about 15 tabs. 2. Attempt to switch back and forth between adjacent tabs. The active tab is made wider when you click it. This just feels sort of weird when trying to switch between tabs.
This will get fixed by having a real tab overflow solution in place, so we don't get small enough tabs to do this.
There is a launcher type of utility that does some neat things with resizing icons. Maybe it can be applied to tabs. http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/
If a tab overflow solution isn't going to be implemented before 2.0 ships, this is going to need to be fixed. There are two problems here: 1) Selected tabs have a min-width of 50px, so when tabs are less than 50 px selected tabs "grow". 2) The size of a tab is not preserved when close buttons are added. You can see this bug even in cases where tabs are bigger than 50 px -- e.g. tabs still "grow" larger when selected because the close button adds to their size. What needs to be done: the max-width for tabs needs to be trimmed down some -- around 20-30 px would be reasonable. Also, the extra size of the close button needs to be taken into account when selecting new tabs.
Even with a real overflow solution this will trip people who lower their minwidth. See screenshots here: http://blog.vlad1.com/archives/2006/02/11/91/ We should never resize a tab to add a close box, ever. Either we should shrink the amount of text on the tab, or if for some reason that is infeasible (say, because the tab is only 5 px wide), we should at that point revert to the 1.x tab close box.
Adam, do you still see this? WFM all tabs same size Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a4pre) Gecko/20070427 Minefield/3.0a4pre
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a5pre) Gecko/20070522 Minefield/3.0a5pre Yeah, looks like tab overflow somehow fixed this. ->WORKSFORME
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 18 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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