Why tabs in FF2 suck compared to FF1.5

|

Here’s one more reason. Suppose I don’t like what I’m seeing on the current tab and want to close it. And just supposed I suffered from a temporary memory lapse and can’t recall the Ctrl-W shortcut, so I need to do it with the mouse.

In FF1.5, since there was one close button which closed the tab, and it was always at the right edge of the “tab bar”, I could just head over there with the cursor, click the button and be done with it.

In FF2, tabs have individual close buttons. So I need to locate the close button on the active tab. And since it’s highly unlikely I remember the exact position of my tab, I need to scan through ALL the tabs to locate the current one. Which is cognitively a demanding task, because contrast between the current and other tabs is not that great at all. So it becomes more difficult for me to close a tab in FF2.

4 Comments

I think the concept of individual tab closing was more or less borrowed from Safari on the Mac; although that doesn’t make it right. :)

Alternatively, you could just mid-click anywhere on a tab, active or inactive, to close it.

Well… there’s this thing called add-ons; you can download and install the Tab Mix tool, which will do all you want :)

I think the concept of individual tab closing was more or less borrowed from Safari on the Mac; although that doesn’t make it right. :)

yeah, actually that makes it WRONG. Sorry, macs are simply poorly designed for to take advantage of muscle memory. Their dock is horrible, and the tab thing is even worse. Hell, this is the company that designed the stupid puck mouse. Sure, it looks cool, but I actually need to get work done. Which is why I immediately switched the browser.tabs.closeButton option in my ff2 to go back to the old (and right) way. I hope we don’t see too much more of this bleed.

Leave a comment