Comments on Ben Godger test build that includes new tab management

Hi, here are my comments and suggestion to the solution proposed by Ben in the Firefox feature brainstorming. Thanks.

Close tab button

• Up to 6 or 7 tabs opened, the close tab button is visible in all of them.
• When 7-8 or more tabs opened, the close tab button is only visible for the selected tab.

This solution maybe addresses the problem commented about closing unintentionally a tab that wanted to be selected.

Figure 1: 6 tabs leave enough room in width to allow the close button.

Shows how FF handles up to 6 tabs with a close button on each of them.

Figure 2: from 7 tabs on, there is no mistake possible.

With 8 tabs the option of the close button is only available for the selected one.

Emphasize the tab selected

Option 1

Orange line on the top of the tab, as showed in Ben Godger’s proposal:

Tabs proposed by Ben Godger.

Option 2

I think it would be advisable to emphasize the tab selected adding a background color to it. But, unlike Opera does, i believe is desirable to choose a color which maintains a higher contrast with the color of the non-selected tabs background.

Opera Example:

Opera background color tabs.

Have you considered to move the tab bar above the navigation toolbar as Opera does? I think this approach is more logic.

Lower line color

Maybe it is possible to extend the background color of a selected tab to the inferior line.

Example (only an outline):

Shows the lower line in the same color as the selected tab.

Opening too many tabs

All the solutions were proposed by Ben and Mike in the Tabbed Overflow proposed, but they do not solve the problem reflected in the tab-overflow bug#221684.

Maybe we could use the same approach as used commonly in search pages results:

Let’s suppose we will see at a time under one browser only a maximum of 20 tabs (maybe 20 could be modified in prefs?).

If the user opens one tab more, we can replace in the tab bar the 20 first for a button named Prev 20 and next to it the 21st tab, so he can open again until another 20 and so on.

If the user clicks on the Prev 20 button, he would see the first 20 tabs and at the end a button named Next 20 or maybe Next 3, depending on how many tabs are left to show.

It would be nice to show somewhere the total number of tabs opened if the number of tabs is over 20, let’s say.

It remains pending a graphical proposal about this solution.