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Starred by 4 users

Issue metadata

Status: Duplicate
Merged: issue 50913
Owner: ----
Closed: Sep 20
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: Linux , Windows , Mac
Pri: 2
Type: Feature



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More options for chrome://flags/#close-buttons-inactive-tabs

Reported by olson....@gmail.com, Sep 19

Issue description

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Open many tabs.
2. Observe the visual noise of many X icons.
3. Observe how easy it is to accidentally close tabs by left-clicking on the X icon.
4. Observe how changing the new flag (close-buttons-inactive-tabs) only solves for #2, but not #3.

What is the expected behavior?
There is an option to entirely remove tab close buttons -- none on the active tab and none on the hovered tabs. The user can still close them by middle-click or Ctrl/Cmd+W. The tab has more screen real estate to display title text. Chances of accidentally closing a tab when left-clicking doesn't increase as more tabs are opened. Tab strip looks less noisy.

What went wrong?
This option does not exist.

Did this work before? No 

Chrome version: 69.0.3497.100  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version: 

Firefox has provided this option for a long time.

Chrome recently added a flag for chrome://flags/#close-buttons-inactive-tabs but there are only two behaviors. The new behavior is to show the close button on the active/hovered tabs only. This increases the chances of accidentally closing tabs because you don't see the X show up until it's too late and your mouse is already over it.

There is an older issue asking for this same feature (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=50913). It was closed as WontFix. Because the Chrome team recently added this new flag, I figured it would be worth asking to extend it a little bit more as this code is fresh in the teams' minds and wouldn't require much additional effort.
 
Labels: Needs-Triage-M69
Labels: -Type-Bug Triaged-ET Target-71 M-71 FoundIn-71 OS-Linux OS-Mac Type-Feature
Status: Untriaged (was: Unconfirmed)
As per comment #0, the issue seems to be a feature request. Hence, marking it as untriaged for further inputs from dev team.

Thanks...!!
Mergedinto: 50913
Status: Duplicate (was: Untriaged)
Thanks for the suggestion.

chrome://flags/ is not intended to be a place for user settable options. Items there are generally new features under development or experiments that may disappear at any time.
Also, reporter, you may be disappointed to note https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1235310 .
Indeed, I am disappointed. @markchang / @pkasting, is this dead because the way it currently operates isn't ideal? To me, the show-X-on-hover seems like a feature no one would want because they'd eventually run into what I described in #0:

> This increases the chances of accidentally closing tabs because you don't see the X show up until it's too late and your mouse is already over it.

I'm just curious for a little more backstory. It seems like this feature keeps gaining momentum and then going back to nothing. This comment here https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=413388#c18 makes it sound like it was never going to be a thing but the addition of the flag certainly means someone was considering something at least similar to it fairly recently. Why was it recently reconsidered in the first place? Why the subsequent about-face?

Thanks!
Also interested as this is still massively annoying UI behaviour.
Firefox seems to have joined the bandwagon, 
Anyone know of a browser that can accomplish what its users request?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177825

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