On Tuesday, October 3, 2017 at 4:36:40 PM UTC-4, Jeff Griffiths wrote: > 1. do you prefer the existing behaviour or the new behaviour? > 2. if you prefer a value for this pref different than 50 or 100, what > is it? Why?
1. Prefer old behavior, but can understand the desire for the new behavior as well. 2. I'm trying to keep an open mind and I'm mostly okay with 80px as a balance. 50 or less would likely look better if we didn't try to show text at all and instead showed just a favicon or a close button like Chrome does. It feels a bit like you are trying to ape the look of Chrome without trying to observe what makes it work -- even though in my mind, it still doesn't work all that well. As a long time Firefox user, if I want to find a tab, I just use the awesomebar % token to find the tab I am interested in, if it's not shown on screen. If it is shown on screen, I'm more likely to ctrl+tab/ctrl+shift+tab over to it, but the text is often helpful here -- multiple tabs with the same favicon doesn't tell me how many tabs I need to pass over to get to where I want to be, unless I look at the tab contents, which is the poor behavior that Chrome forces. One thing I noticed about Chrome (I opened it to play with their tab behavior) is that once the tabs get very pointy, *they overflow*, and in a way that doesn't even let users drag the the overflowed tabs to a new window, or to close it without using keyboard shortcuts. They overflow into a nether where they aren't visible *at all*. At least Firefox prevents that behavior. > One aspect that I would like to stress about this change: most > existing Firefox users will never see it, because they are unlikely to > open m,ore than 10 tabs at any one time. So what we are really talking > about is a change that will trade being able to see more tabs vs being > able to read more text in each tab title. That may be the case, but I currently have 49 tabs open in the tab I am composing this message in, and I routinely walk by people at work who have 20 tabs or so open. > Moving forward there are a few different options: I think that this is being done with very short notice (why are we talking about doing this in Firefox 57 - if this was important, shouldn't it have been discussed or under planning for a few weeks or months at least?) - or is a way to make a change on a whim that you believe will make Chrome users comfortable without having to deal with a lot of review? I'd prefer to not look at this cynically, but I've seen Mozilla's developers move -- it's generally deliberately, and always trying to make the right call. This feels a lot more like guesswork. Either way, I think this should be a *user facing* preference - the customize UI makes the most sense to me, but about:preferences would work too. A live slider would probably work great, but a dropdown like exists for density in customize should also work. I strongly don't believe that this should only be accessible via about:config. I also don't think that existing Firefox users should be auto-migrated to this preference. If anything, it should only be for new installers where there Chrome is already installed (new installers where only Safari/Edge are installed show no clear "preference" for the Chrome behavior). Why also not set up some experiments here targeting high tab users? > Longer term I intend to propose a more in-depth study of tab behaviour > among different user segments and assess different strategies for > heavier tab users including things like horizontal tab scaling, > vertical tabs, etc. I can't see that happening before Q1 next year. This feels more like a design problem that should probably be solved more immediately if you want to push 50px tabs out (which who knows, may be ideal for switchers). Some suggestions: 1. Don't try to show any text, show favicons/speaker icon when tab get too small 2. Play with the look of the tab bar -- the new default theme looks ugly when I have many tabs open at 50px. I'm sure not constraining design to the new Photon UI and rethinking some of the look would produce a better result (this is why I feel that this is being done on a whim, I don't think design would have let this out as it is with 50px; it is *ugly*). Amusingly enough Chrome looks more like Australis currently. 3. Pinned tabs behavior feels fine to me. 4. Don't get rid of overflow. Chrome's behavior is broken. Note: I prefer the existing behavior, but I hope the above demonstrates that this requires more design thinking than doing this on a whim. > cheers, Jeff > > [1] https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a75e0386aad8 _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
