I like having this option back, as I know this was a feature that a lot of people liked in the past. (even though I'm personally ok with the 100px width)
I've been trying to use the new default (50px) for a couple of hours, and it felt surprisingly unusable, in a way that I couldn't quite figure out why. After a while, I think I've reached the explanation: The purpose of overflowing tabs is to prevent them to go shrink to unusable sizes.. Even at 50px, I have enough tabs open to make it overflow. So it overflows, but the tabs won't grow back to something more usable, so what happens is that I have a tab strip full of unreadable tabs, and it still scrolls (i.e., there was no benefit in the smaller min-width, only downsides) It would be nice if the tabs would grow again a little bit when overflow happens, but that is probably too daunting visually. So I know this is a no-go. Playing with the value, I actually really liked 80px, and I can see that winning in favor of 100px. We could perhaps go as low as 75, but IMHO that would be the limit. my 2 cents Felipe On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 5:36 PM, Jeff Griffiths <jgriffi...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Hi! > > tl;dr we changed the default pixel value at which we overflow tabs, > and I want your feedback. > > We just added a change to m-c[1] that does to things: > > 1. it reintroduces an old preference 'browser.tabs.tabMinWidth' that > contains a pixel value that controls the minimum width of a tab. > > 2. it sets the default value of the tab to 50, previously this value > was hard-coded at 100. > > Work is being tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ > show_bug.cgi?id=1404465 > > We did this based on some early feedback from a few different sources > that people coming from chrome ( or in some cases, existing users ) > thought that the Firefox behaviour of scrolling the tabstrip was > off-putting. We looked into this and I generally agree with the > comments: chrome's "infinite tabs visible" approach results in a much > higher usable/visible tab count in a given window than ours does. This > change puts us roughly at par. > > To put this in numbers: > * in chrome I can open ~ 24 tabs before the tabstrip's usability is > degraded a lot > * in current firefox, I can open ~ 12 tabs before tabstrip scrolling > kicks in > * with this change applied I can open 25 tabs with the pref value set to > 50px > > ( Caveats: this was on the built-in display on my Macbook Pro with the > default theme, your mileage may vary, etc ) > > I want feedback on this change from these lists, and will also be > looking for feedback from the original sources of this complaint. In > particular: > > 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? > > 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. > > Moving forward there are a few different options: > > 1. uplifting this change into 57 ( possibly with a different default > value ) If we think the patch has a generally positive effect and no > downsides, we may decide to uplift into 57 Beta and let it ride the > trains. > > 2. keeping the change in 58, possibly with a different value. > > 3. keeping the change in 58, preserving the current setting of 100px > and providing an alternate pref ( probably a toggle or predefined > values ) for "skinnier" tabs. > > 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. > > cheers, Jeff > > [1] https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a75e0386aad8 > _______________________________________________ > firefox-dev mailing list > firefox-...@mozilla.org > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
