Reducing tab size

[Sean Egan]

On 8/17/07, Kevin M Stange <kevin at simguy.net> wrote:
> It's true that Firefox does the same thing, but there is a preference to
> always show the tab bar, and I, at least, always make that the first
> preference I change in a new Firefox profile.

I suspect you're the only person who can truthfully say that ;)

Anyway, there's enough people on this thread alone who are against it,
that it might be worth a Pidgin preference, or at least more careful
consideration.

Somewhat strange is that, while on most of the issues we discuss, most
of the developers have a good consensus, and we argue against angry
non-developing users, here, it seems it's all the developers against
it, and the non-developing users are either in favor or apathetic.

As I mentioned before, this issue doesn't really affect me as my
windows tend to be full of tabs. But, I love playing devil's advocate.

So far, it seems like the main reason people don't like this is the
so-called "dancing widgets" hypothesis. Again,
http://pidgin.im/~seanegan/dancing.gif doesn't seem like a big deal to
me. The real quesiton is: what purpose does a tab in a notebook serve
if it's the only one there? It seems like the tab-bar is a waste of
space if there's only one tab. Why does the benefit of avoiding the
"dance" outweigh the cost of that wasted space?

In the past, we definitely had good reasons for this: the tab was
larger, so the 'dance' was more obtrusive. The 'dance' screwed up
scrolling, causing the scroll position to move from the bottom,
requiring you to manually scroll each conversation.. We 'danced'
regardless of tab placement (left or right tabs are a much more
significant dance). We had no other logical drag handle for
conversations.

It seems to me that all those issues are now resolved. The entirety of
the cost of this 'dance' is http://pidgin.im/~seanegan/dancing.gif
which doesn't seem to justify having an interface to choose all of one
conversation.

-s.