jarkolicious

Odd Close Tab Behavior Using GrApple Yummy Theme for Firefox 3

• design, firefox, mozilla, software

I have been playing with the Firefox 3 betas on my Windows box at work ever since Beta 4 was released for mass consumption. At home I am primarily a Mac user, essentially performing 98.6% of my home work on my MacBook Pro. At home I am extremely dependent upon the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for Firefox, using it as both my bookmark manager and to post links to del.icio.us almost daily.
It was because of the lack of a FF3 compatible extension that I did not make the move to using Firefox 3 on a regular basis at home until I recently ran across an alpha version of the extension released for testing purposes.

It was approximately 4 days ago that I made the move to start using Firefox 3 as my primary browser at home. I have always been fond of Firefox on OSX even though it looks horrible in OSX, mainly because of the ease of extensibility. Although Safari 3 is blindingly fast, I am exceedingly reliant upon del.icio.us for my bookmarking, opting not to use local browser-based bookmark solutions.

The default theme in Firefox 3 on OSX, while appearing much more OSX-like in look-and-feel, still leaves a lot to be desired. The huge “back” button seems pretty pointless to me; I do not think people need to be treated as if they are idiots, thus leading to the design of a larger-than-life “back” button so that people can easily find the one button used dramatically more often than any other browser button.

In addition, much of what John Gruber has said regarding Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3 resonates. I agree with many of his points against Firefox 3, with some of the complaints being far more annoying than others, especially when trying to use Firefox 3 on a regular basis.

But I digress.

Since I dislike the way the default Firefox 3 theme looks, I opted to install what is probably the best set of alternative FF3 themes available today: GrApple Yummy by Aronnax. I have been an Aronnax fan ever since his first set of native OSX-like themes for Firefox 2. He is an extremely talented Firefox theme designer who offers a lot of free goodwill to the community.

After using Firefox 3 with GrApple Yummy for the past few days I have found one particular annoyance which is, well, annoying me to no end. I am using the default theme While using Firefox 2 I never had a problem with accidentally clicking the “close tab” button. Granted there were times where I did click the close tab button even though I intended to click the tab itself. But that was the exception, and only in very rare circumstances. The point is that in the few cases this happened, I clicked the close button rather than near the close button.

I’ve noticed that the frequency in which I accidentally closed tabs has increased exponentially since installing the GrApple Yummy theme. I may have 15 tabs open, all displayed at once, click to jump to a new tab and wham, the tab disappears and I have to add extra sets to reopen the tab. This is a waste of time which should not be necessary!

After doing some minor investigating it appears the problem with the close tab buttons is due to the hotspot area being larger than the button itself. Here is what the default tabbar looks like when a bunch of tabs are open:

Take a look at how wide the hover hotspot has been defined:

It is blatantly obvious the region which defines the hotspot for the close tab button does not match the actual size of the close tab button itself. Either that or Firefox 3 is not properly interpreting the region definition, and then incorrectly enlarging the area which defines the close button. This creates an effect whereby the close button acts larger than it really is, increasing the frequency in which someone accidentally closes a tab even though the tab was clicked and not the close tab button.

I have faith that Aronnax will fix this bug within due time, but thought I would offer my thoughts about this bug in the event someone else was experiencing similar issues. It sure seems like an easy fix to a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things.

Are you using Firefox 3 on OSX? If so, do you use the default theme or a third-party theme?