Jeff Griffiths wrote:
1. do you prefer the existing behaviour or the new behaviour?
I prefer the new behavior.
2. if you prefer a value for this pref different than 50 or 100, what
is it? Why?
I prefer a value of 0 (i.e. truly infinite tabs, never scrolling),
because I distinguish tabs by their positions as much as (if not more so
than) their labels, and showing all tabs fixes their positions, making
them much easier to find again and click on, even with only a hazy
recollection of where they are.
(Tabs do move a bit as other tabs are added/removed, but this movement
is much slighter than that induced by scrolling, and they still stay in
the same area of the screen.)
Also, when I'm traversing to a far-away tab, especially when using
keyboard shortcuts, showing all tabs enables me to "see ahead" and
locate the target tab with my eyes in time to slow down and stop on it
with my fingers. With scrolling tabs, however, when far-away tabs are
offscreen, I tend to overshoot the target and have to backtrack.
Back when we introduced scrolling, I set the preference to minimize it.
Then, when the preference stopped working, I learned to live with
scrolling tabs. But I still find it cumbersome and would prefer to
disable tab scrolling.
I recall that Aza Raskin made some similar points back when we
introduced scrolling. I think this was his blog post on the subject:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefox_20_tabs_gone_wrong/
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.
I'm actually the common case most of the time. I don't hoard tabs, and I
close all tabs (except a small set of pinned tabs) after each browsing
"session", which lasts anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours (or on
very rare occasions, days). So I don't usually have more than a handful
of tabs open.
But occasionally I do research that prompts me to open 20-40 tabs and
then jump back and forth between them (f.e. when shopping for a product
for which there are many choices, or when investigating a complex
technical issue in our products). And that's when the tab overflow
behavior makes a difference.
-myk
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