I’d like to see the tab pane below the tool bars on the left. I find that I often overshoot the back button when using the mouse; when the pane is minimized, overshooting the back button causes the pane to expand, covering the tool bars, including the back button. It’s a bit frustrating.
Here’s an example image:
Seconded. As far as I’m concerned, tab center needs to be a clone of Tree Style Tabs and Tab Mix Plus, without the occasional glitches when a Firefox update breaks them.
That seems like an odd thing for Mozilla to spend effort on. We already have Tree Style Tabs and Tab Mix Plus to show us how people use things that are like them. Tab Center is aiming for something different, to give us a new perspective…
The problem is, every couple of releases, one or the other of those
extensions is broken by Firefox changes. And, however dedicated their
developers may be, there’s always the chance one will go away. The only
reason I’m on Firefox is because once upon a time Chrome killed their
side tabs “experiment”. I’d like to see Firefox build on the good
points of TST/TMP, but the current side tabs test, imho, goes away from
the very reason to use side tabs in the first place.
@floridamatt Everybody surely agrees with you that add-ons regressing with new versions of Firefox is a problem; this is a major flaw of the XUL model which makes it very challenging to make changes to Firefox without breaking add-ons that have modified the UI.
This is one of the important benefits of WebExtensions: rather than have add-ons prescriptively telling Firefox how to change the browser, it declaratively says what it wants to do, and it’s up to Firefox to determine how best to implement that. WebExtensions will let us be more agile with UI changes without risking add-on breakage. It’s going to be great.
That said, those add-ons breaking is an orthogonal problem to Tab Center. Both Tab Mix Plus and Tree-Style Tabs add incredibly useful features to how tabs work in Firefox, but those improvements do come at a cost (cognitive load, interface complexity, etc).
Tab Center was looking to test a simpler, more streamlined side tabs interface suitable for mainline audience. Will it get merged into Firefox exactly as it is? That doesn’t seem particularly likely (@bwinton may have more to say about that), but it also served another purpose: helping us understand what sorts of WebExtension APIs we need to build to enable that sort of experience in the new add-on format to ensure that add-ons like Tree-Style Tabs and Tab Mix Plus are able to live far into the future. That has certainly been achieved.
