Add a new tab button to the tabbar

[Sebastián Porta]

It would be nice if you could add a button to the tabbar to open new tabs (like Chrome, Opera and Firefox)
I know there's a button that you could put on the toolbar but I think it's better to put the button next to the last tab where usually you want a new one.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I would also like a new tab button in the tabbar, but I think it'd be better to put it in a static location. Putting it where the next tab would go makes it a moving target, which means the interface is less predictable and makes muscle memory impossible. So, I think it'd be better to have it stuck on the right side of the bar where it won't be displaced by any tabs and it won't displace any tabs.

I know Christian's concern with placing the button in the tabbar is that if you don't have the tabbar set to "always show", the button is only useful when you have 2 or more tabs open already. It seems like most browsers are starting to solve this by always showing the tabbar, but I don't know if this is a design decision that we'd want to make with Midori.

Another concern is duplicate UI. If the recommended configuration is to have the button in the toolbar, showing it in the tabbar is duplicate UI. However, we currently also have the button in the AppMenu. So, I suppose we don't currently don't have a recommended work flow for this.

Considering these things... My suggestion would be to set some different defaults in Midori. Like other browsers, we should set the tabbar to "always show" and place the button on the right side of the tabbar. It also may be useful to investigate making the button have a right-click option for making a new window. Then we can remove those two entries from the AppMenu and not have to worry about showing the button in the toolbar by default.

For heavy tab users, this is probably going to be a perfectly comfortable change since they have the tabbar shown almost always anyway. It will also place the actions closer to the things they affect and clean up the AppMenu. I think the only drawback/concern with always showing the tabbar is using up screen space. However since Midori hides the menubar by default I don't think we'd be taking up any more space than any other browser (except for Chrome which places the tabs in the window titlebar).

Thoughts Christian? :D

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

One thing I forgot to throw out there was the case that someone disables the "always show tabbar" option. This will of course make adding a new tab difficult unless the user also adds the new tab button to the toolbar. And if they do add the button to the toolbar it creates the duplicate UI we talked about.

In this case, maybe we detect if the button is in the toolbar and only show the tabbar button if it is not already present? But since this is a conscious decision to change the UI from the recommended config, I don't think these points are a major concern.

[Kenneth Malac (kennethm777-deactivatedaccount)]

I think the new tab buttons should be on the far left. All the navigation + the favorite button is there

[Arturo Torres Sánchez (r2d2.art2005)]

@Kenneth
But the new tab appears on the far right. So the new tab button makes more sense on the far right.

[Hernán (hrustein)]

Daniel, I'm no designer but I wanted to share a thought with you
Is there really a need to see the web address ALL the time?
Don't you think it's a a waste of UI?

I know chromium is working on what they call "compact interface", I think something like that is the way to go.

Perhaps, taking this into consideration, the design team can think of another way to show the New Tab bar, perhaps integrating all in one panel.

I just don't see why we should keep seeing the web address all the time, I think it's a legacy thing...

[Peter Hatina (phatina)]

Do you mean something like this? I am also used to see this "add" button in the tab row. If it is there, we can drop default the "duplicate" toolbar action, as well.

[gue5t gue5t (gue5t)]

I'd an extension that performs this behavior. This seems well-suited to being included as an extension given that it's not necessarily going to be desired by all users and it's pretty simple functionality to drop in.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

@ Kenneth, yes actually I think you're right. It would be more consistent with button placement for the "new" whatever across other apps as well.

@ Hernán, That seems like another discussion entirely, but I think it'd be interesting to sit down with a few users and see how they use the browser without an address bar. I'm not sure how they would do it, to be honest. But yes, this is another interesting argument is that the new tab button (in the toolbar) becomes useless if you don't have the address bar also shown.

@ gue5t, Even if it was a configurable behavior, I think it's important that it default to being included. Consider that the more experienced users who might not want this are going to know how to turn it off, but the less experienced users who are going to expect this (from using other web browsers) aren't going to know how to turn it on.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Users without a toolbar is typically kiosk mode users who don't open tabs or fullscreen keyboard-driven users, at least as far as I'm aware, so that seems like a rather theoretical argument.

The real question was and still is, why would you consume space in the tabbar, taking it away from tabs, if the toolbar has a lot of unused space? I'm trying my best, but I need to find a logical argument other than "it's trendy".

[Grzegorz G. (grzesiek1e5)]

I would like to see this in Midori. At least as an option.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

At the end of the day these are the decisive arguments for me:
 - Button in the tabbar means Back becomes the easy top-left hit target.
 - If other tabbed applications do the same, it increases consistency.
 - Always visible tabbar will increase discoverability.

If the Granite notebook works well, it's key to add this to other applications, and would convince me personally it's the right design. So I suggest to get that tested in the next release.

[NewfieBullet (n-bullet)]

I think I have to agree with Christian on this one. When you first open a browser you probably go for the tab button right away so you can open all of your most visited sites.

Having the new tab button in the tabbar on the left increases discoverability by a wide margin. I can backup this statement by my own experience when I first tried Midori. It was a pain to find the tab button first time around, normally browsers like Firefox and Chrome have their new tab button on the left. Including it in Midori would ease the transition for new users. Having the new tab button on the left next to other 'action' buttons would increase productivity. When I switched from Chrome to Midori my productivity fell by a slim margin.

In Midori, you have to drag the mouse upward and to the right to the other side of the screen while in maximized mode to reach the button. Then you have to drag it downward to the left to get to the new tab that you opened.
In Chrome, the button is next to your new tab, so very little movement is necessary between the button and the tab.

[Daniel Waller (daniel-diewallers)]

@ Daniel F.

I think the 'New Tab' button placement as it is right now is really unintuitive and slow if you don't want to use 'ctrl + t'.
Cause really it's too far away from where the action is going on (the viewport) and for new users the icon currently being used by default might be a little hard to recognize as opening a new tab.

Moving and sticking it to the far left doesn't really solve the problem in my opinion because most of the time the users focus (and with that the position of their mousepointer) is going more towards the center of the screen.
So I think the 'New Tab' button should be clearly visible and fast to access when you look at the center of the screen. Thus the dynamic positioning after the last opened tab seems the fastest and most intuitive place to put the button.
And we should probably just use a plus sign for the button.

[Grzegorz G. (grzesiek1e5)]

I still think Both in Midori and in Granite new tab button should be on the right of the tabs. Maybe it's moving target, but it's logical (new tabs appear where the button is) and users are used to it. (LTR users.)

[Liviu Andronic (landronimirc)]

I've just tried out midori-granite 0.4.7 [1] and I was a bit surprised by the layout of the 'new tab' and individual 'close tab' buttons on the tabbar (see attached screen shot):
- the 'new tab' button is on the far-left side of the tabbar (essentially no difference from the current static layout)
- the 'close tab' individual buttons are situated to the left of the 'tab label'.

This might be fine for RTL or Elementary or Mac users, but as far as I go this quickly diminishes the usefulness of teh feature. Is there a way to put the 'new tab' and individual 'close tab' buttons to the right?

[1] https://launchpad.net/~midori/+archive/midori-dev

[Grzegorz G. (grzesiek1e5)]

@Liviu:
In theory this should update based on position of your window controls. So if you have them like in Windows (on the right), tabs should have them on the right too. But maybe it isn't implemented yet.

[Liviu Andronic (landronimirc)]

Automatic repositioning doesn't seem to work, indeed, at least not under Xfce (on Linux). As you can see in the screenshot, on my system the WM controls are on the right.

[Grzegorz G. (grzesiek1e5)]

@Liviu:
You can ask them on elementary-dev on freenode if it is a bug in granite tabbar or they have changed their mind.

In my opinion when window controls are on the right, tab controls should be on the right too (as they do in Firefox, for example). Also "new tab" button should be on the right side of tabs (again, like in current browsers), because new tabs should appear on the right (like letters: if you write, newest letters are on the right). If you want to avoid moving targets, you can put "new tab" button on the far right. (If you have many tabs open, it will be here anyway.)

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Marking as fix released since this is handled in Midori-granite