the recent updates to the way tabs are displayed and added in the tab bar has worsened the display consistency very noticeably

[Rayman]

--1.  a recent update has made the tabs size inconsistent. the presence of the audio play button and the mute button in the same place changes the size of the tab in the tab bar. if i have some music running in the background while clicking through other tabs, every time the music stops for a few seconds the mute button disappears and the tab shrinks, just enough to miss the X to close it or to accidentally hit it and close the tab. i have lost way too many half written comments and progress in lists and videos because the tabs just happened to move while i was clicking through them. it's rather irritating and frustrating.

--2.  a similar thing happens when i open a bunch of tabs, enough to have a scroll bar button appear on the sides of the tab bar, and click the X to close them one at a time. at some point the scroll button will disappear and again, the tabs will shift position, just enough to move from clicking the next tab to clicking right on the X of the current tab. this is a consistent minor annoyens.

--3.  but the most recent update tops that easily in terms of annoyens factor. until that update when you open tabs with middle-click, it always opens right of the current active tab and subsequent tabs were opened right of the last opened tab, until you switch active tabs. all very consistent and reliable. but that update screwed something up in that code, now some tabs are added to the right as before while others are added just besides the active tab, in a very inconsistent and unpredictable manner. if i open tabs for pictures in a list, i now have to manually go through each and move them around until i have them in the right order. this is potentially really tedious for longer lists and something very annoying.

thankfully this issue seems to correlate with using most of my laptops processing power and trying to open multiple tabs at once or in fast succession, so normal use is not too impeded. though unfortunately firefox is using a lot of ram with many open tabs, so that still happens quite often...

--4.  and to make issue 3. even worse, the new tab group feature makes it extra annoying to move tabs around. if i hesitate to drop a tab for even half a second or am not quite precise enough drop it onto another tab instead of in between, i create a new tab group, which both makes tab moving harder and shifts the tabs to the side...

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possible solutions:

issue 1. can be solved by making the minimum tab size a bit larger, just enough that the audio play and mute button does no longer affect the tab size. this would be just a few pixels so most people would probably not even notice the change.

issue 2. can be solved by either having the scroll buttons always visible and just unusable and greyed out until needed, or by moving the left and right edges of the tab bar inwards to guarantee enough space for the scroll buttons whether they are visible or not.

issue 3. just needs to return to what it did before that update. no further modifications required.

issue 4. come from an introduction of a new feature, probable made extra visible to ensure every user finds out about the new feature. well, we all have found it by now, you can stop. just make the hover over tab to activate timer a second longer or even better, make it entirely manual through the side menu or right click menu to create new tab groups.

what users want from their browser of choice is a consistent and easy to use design. what these issue did was adding inconsistent behavior, and annoyens factors for most user with many tabs open.

the solutions i suggest above are mostly easy to change and implement. the dev team just needs someone to tell them to actually implement them. and i hope that happens fast...

i'm going to put this post up in bugzilla too since at least one issue is clearly a bug.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

About tabs size

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/stop-changing-the-size-of-the-tab-when-audio-plays/m-p/92... maybe browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

1 - Go to Configuration Editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
2 - Enter a search term browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

[Rayman]

yes, they have some discussions about the topic of issue 1. thanks for guiding me to forum.

unfortunately they have only found more aspects of the issue, not working solutions...

it seems like the code for the play audio and mute buttons are messing up things more deeply than i thought.

since this goes beyond my limited programming experience, i will have to leave it to the professionals and wait for proper update.