> I don't know about you, but a common case for me is go-to-news-site, > open-N-articles-in-tabs, read-articles (maybe ;-) ). Probably learned > that in the days of less bandwidth; stuff can pull down in the > background. Saves a lot of go-back, > wait-for-page-to-load/render/scroll/etc. > > For that usage, I need at least a word or so of the title - N tabs > together with the same favicon. Current width mostly works for this. > > I find (perhaps because I'm a mozilla user, and a tab-hoarder) that > Chrome's UI is DREADFUL for anyone with lots of tabs - and probably > intentionally to push users into closing them, since large numbers of > tabs simply doesn't work as well in Chrome as in Firefox. So mimicing > their behavior is NOT a good idea, IMHO.
I'm one of the people (a minority in this thread, it appears) who prefers Chrome's behavior and who'd like a skinny-tab option in Firefox, though not necessarily the default option. I use all the major browsers, typically with a dozen or more tabs open in the browser I'm using for my primary work at any given time. I vastly prefer Chrome's tab behavior for several reasons and rely on it as my primary browser in part because of it. I believe the complaint of "XYZ pixels is too narrow because it hides necessary information in the tab" misses another point. For me, having tabs vanish off one side or the other of the tab strip is a worse omission of important information. I have typically navigate my 20 or 30 or 40 tabs mostly by keyboard, cycling one way or the other across the tab strip, and for me the spatial arrangement is very important (as is tab-switching speed). I keep a mental map where everything is, and the tab strip mirrors it. I have different patches of a few nearby tabs for related tasks, for example. When some or most tabs are hidden, I find I get "lost." One visible tab strip helps me remember what I have going on when I lose track during multiasking moments. In Firefox, I have to compensate by opening new browser windows (harder than in Chrome since I can't select a group of them and tear them away to a new window) to manually partition my work into different clusters of tabs. Chrome gracefully degrades the amount of information visible on each tab in a way I find useful. I often have lots of tabs with the same favicon visible (Google Docs, news articles from one website, etc) and though it would be nice to see full tabs I find the favicon is enough for me to keep my bearings. Most of the time, though, I have many different websites open and a glance at the favicons is all I need to know what's up. The audio indicator is indeed a very useful part of the tab UI. In Chrome, it's the last thing visible as tabs get narrower, obscuring even the favicon. The close box disappears as tabs get narrower, but it's still visible on the active tab. When tabs are so narrow that only one item is visible, the close box is that single thing (overriding the audio indicator). Google clearly thought about this behavior carefully, and I vastly prefer it and often use Chrome for my primary work browser purely because I dislike Firefox's disappearing tabs so much. There is an argument to be made for making life easier for people moving to Firefox from Chrome, which clearly is an ambition in the current Firefox 57 Quantum push. I don't have any data about how widespread my preferences are or how much of a barrier it is adjusting to Firefox's disappearing tabs, but this heavy Chrome user prefers Chrome's approach. I'm not trying to argue that my preferences are universal. But I expect Google made its choices pretty carefully and not as a way to punish people for using too many tabs. I use lots more tabs than the average user, but I expect the general trend is drifting toward more and more tabs, so graceful handling of overflow will become important for a larger fraction of people as time goes on. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
