Re: [Usability] GtkNotebook scrolling

[Cody Russell <bratsche gnome org>]

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 22:43 +0100, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> I think you must be confusing Firefox with Epiphany. Firefox doesn't
> react on scrollwheel on tab out-of-the-box (and if I would know about
> a
> Firefox extension that enables it, I'd have it installed). Epiphany
> does
> support scrollwheel-on-tabs simply because it uses a GtkNotebook. 

I actually tested this after reading Jean-Peer's response.  Using
Firefox that I got from Ubuntu, it does do something on scroll events,
and it's actually quite nice.

As you open new tabs, they shrink in size until it gets to a point where
they won't shrink any further.  At that point the tabs on the left go
offscreen while you're adding new ones on the right.  Once you've got
some offscreen notebook tabs you can mouse-wheel back and forth and it
scrolls through the notebook tabs but *without changing the selected
tab*.  That's the key difference between Firefox and gtk's behavior, and
that is my particular source of annoyance with the current gtk behavior.

I'd be interested in implementing something better than what we have.
Scroll events on a notebook tab didn't really make sense to me
conceptually before, but the way the Firefox tabs are implemented it
kind of does.  The big usability flaw with ours (imo, anyway) is that
scroll events actually switch the page on you.

/ Cody