Reducing tab size

[Richard Laager]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 12:59 -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> Kevin said that nobody liked making tabs invisible from single-tabbed
> windows, and that he'd get everyone to complain at me, but nobody has
> since.

I thought this was basically universal in the set of people that matter.
If you special case one conversation, the following problems exist:

1. Users get dancing widgets as they cross the boundary.
2. There is no drop target. Yes, the infopane COULD work here, but it's
   messy and seems like a hack.
3. There is no drag target. Using the infopane here seems VERY wrong.
4. It may decrease consistency:
	a) GEdit, for example, shows a tab for just one document.
	b) Spreadsheet applications (including OpenOffice.org and
	   Microsoft Excel, and probably others) show tabs for different
	   pages even when only one is being used.
	c) Applications such as browsers that support tabs, in many
	   people's opinion, are sub-optimal now. They hide the tab bar
	   so users don't know tabs exist. If this is "fixed"
	   ("changed", if you disagree), then our move would decrease
	   consistency further.

If this is happening with enough frequency to both you (meaning anyone,
not necessarily Sean), it's probably because you generally only have one
conversation open at a time, in which case you should TURN OFF tabs
entirely and leave the rest of us alone.

I'm very strongly opposed to hiding the tab for one conversation.

I'd also like to point out that I dislike your logic about complaints. I
wasn't following closely enough the past couple of weeks to notice that
things were changed. (I hadn't even done a new compile until just
recently.) I'm obviously not going to be complaining about stuff that
works and is right. We know that some people will complain about things
that are just fine for the majority.

Richard
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