[Camino] [SOC] Improvements to the Camino tabbed-browsing experience

[Stuart Morgan]

On May 27, 2006, at 1:57 AM, Ruurd Koons wrote:
> - keep Z-order of tabs

The issue with z-index is that it can create a lot of hidden state,  
which would mean that unless users have a complete mental history of  
their tab use they have absolutely no way to predict what will happen  
when they close a given tab.  It's one of those things that can work  
well in the cases where it works, but degrades very poorly (into an  
essentially random experience for users).

I know Firefox was at least looking at alternate ways of dealing with  
tab closing; there's a discussion here:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009210.html
of a slightly more complicated heuristic that tries to balance  
expectations of the simple open-then-close case with the longer-term  
problems of building up a lot of hidden state that users can't keep  
track of.

-Stuart