GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 153792
Tabs shouldn't become hidden when there's too many of them
Last modified: 2005-11-07 04:51:46 UTC
This is a useability issue which has been bothering me for a long time, but I guess I just assumed someone had already filed a bug about it. Right now when there's too many tabs, Epiphany will let them hide off the left or right side of the tabbar, which makes tabbed browsing really difficult to use. I can't see all the pages that are open in one window and if I know I opened a page that's now hidden, I can't tell if it's going to be on the left or right side of the tabbed bar. And if I have the right-most tab selected and I try to click the left arrow button to get to tabs on the left side, it has to jump through all the tabs I already see before it evens starts scrolling to the hidden tabs. What I'm usually forced to do in a situation like this is to just go to the Tabs menu and see all the open tabs I have from there. So in other words, after a certain number of pages are loaded in tabs, Epiphany's tabbed browsing becomes unusable and I'm forced to use a completely different widget just to manage my open pages. It would be nice if Epiphany did what every other tabbed browser (including Mozilla and Safari on OS X) I've tried seems to do, which is keep all the tabs visible. In Safari, if the tabs get crowded, it'll compress the page titles by taking out common words. Like if there's pages titled "Epiphany - Download", "Epiphany - About", "Epiphany - Bug Reports", Safari will show the tabs as "Download", "About". But it would be a big improvement if I just saw tabs to begin with, especially since now Epiphany is hiding tabs even though there's plenty of room for the titles at 1600x1280 maximized...
Mass reassigning of Epiphany bugs to epiphany-maint@b.g.o
Yeah, this has been bugging me for a while too. Firefox has somewhat nice behavior, which is that it makes the tabs smaller. Opera does this too.
+1 for this bug. It's really a problem for me, personnaly, but also for newbies. I think that Epiphany is a lot better for newbie than Firefox. But this feature is a big accessibility problem for people with sight difficulties. You can't tell, at first sight, if you have 7 or 87 opened tabs !!!! Really a big problem. I hope to see a solution soon.
Also, another problem I face with epiphany : If the new tab is opened in the hidden part, I have no feedback at all wheter or not I have clicked on the link. So, most of the time, I click two times, just two be sure. I can't imagine newbies !! (you will maybe argue that most newbies don't use tabs, but somes do it) This is my main annoyance for now with Epiphany.
perhaps this should be fixed in GTK+ (GtkNotebook widget) since it is present in epiphany, galeon, gedit.
This bothers me as well and I'd like to see it fixed soon. I think it is a GTK+ issue though as mentioned above. I know there has been some discussion in the past about how to handle tabs but there is a lot of disagreement about what is "usable".
*** Bug 310180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It should most definitely keep all tabs visible; even when I know where my missing tabs go, it prevents me from having an overview of what tabs I have and it slows me down considerably - which in turn makes me annoyed and irritable. As for newbies... in this case, the "newbies" are in many cases people used to tabs, but new to this behaviour. These people will almost certainly think something is terribly broken, close the app and don't look back. I almost did the first time. Also, true newbies will often be told by converting friends how good tabs are. And they are, when they don't disappear. :) Almost all tabbed products I know of shrinks the tabs, a few opens a new row of tabs instead. With the big tabs that are in Epiphany, the second option would probably not be a good one, but I don't see any reason for #1 not to work. Extra coolness like stripping out common words sounds nice too, I'd like to see that even earlier than that, as soon as titles are clipped this mechanism should start making things better. :) I've heard the argument that "tabs aren't useful after 5" as some kind of argument against allowing more tabs, but that would be up to the user, now wouldn't it? I use more in browsers, and often 10-15 in text editors. Text editors, btw, could also benefit seriously from that similar word stripper! Anyway, this is one of the big issues keeping me from using for instance Epiphany right now, so here's to hoping it gets fixed! Thanks. :)
Shouldn't this bug be a blocker for the next GTK release? It is a _major_ usability issue.
I just had an idea : 1) Try to keep the current tab as in the middle as it can. So, it will not be in the middle only if there's too few tab on the left or too few on the righ. So, for example, if your tab is not in the middle but a bit on the right, it would mean that the rightest tab is the last one. If your tab is not in the middle but on the left, it would mean that the "leftest" tab is the first one. 2) If there's hidden tabs on one side, say on the righ, blur with a gradiant the last seen tab on the right. So you would understand that there's something hidden after. 3) Make arrow a bit bigger 4) When moving your mouse on the arrow or on the blured part, it will scroll automatically, without requiring a clic. The scroll speed will be proportional to where you are. If you are on the middle of the last tab, where it begins to be blured, it would scroll slowly. If you are on the arrow, it will scroll quickly. Not sure it's a good idea, but at least it's an idea and it seems much better to me than the current situation.
The "shrink tab labels" aspect of this bug is covered in bug 125250. Proponents of multiple rows of tabs should proceed to bug 110540. I'm going to mark this bug a duplicate of bug 125250 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125250 ***