Mouseover Tabs Preview Documents

[GarrettS]

Description

When moving the cursor over any inactive tab, that tab's docuent is shown after a delay. This causes usability problems. Due to timed delay, errors occur when switching tabs, whereby the wrong document will be shown (issue #14258)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Load up a bunch of tabs with heavy apps like TradingView, YouTUbe, etc
2. Move cursor over inactive tabs

Actual result:
document view change to show flashes of other documents, sometimes white/grey

Expected result:
No change in default view

Reproduces how often:
100%

Brave Version

about:brave info:

Brave: 0.22.721
V8: 6.6.346.32
rev: bfe7cdd
Muon: 6.0.12
OS Release: 17.5.0
Update Channel: Release
OS Architecture: x64
OS Platform: macOS
Node.js: 7.9.0
Brave Sync: v1.4.2
libchromiumcontent: 66.0.3359.170

Reproducible on current live release:

Additional Information

[GarrettS]

Notice that the GMail tab is selected and EOS Classic document is shown. The GMail tab was activated by clicking on it, yet the "EOS Classic" web page is displayed.

The black boxes are the parts that I edited in Preview. The blue square I accidentally added in Preview.

[bsclifton]

@GarrettS there are some known issues with the wrong tab being displayed (as you've noted in #14258).

Turning off the tab preview functionality seems to help. You can access it from about:preferences#tabs:

Since this issue is known (and already captured with your other issue), I'll close this one as a duplicate

[GarrettS]

Bug #14258 was closed by me. So now you have two closed bugs. And you’ve also Mark this is a duplicate of the other closed bug.

Edit: I see #14258 was reopened.

Mouse over feature problem is a bug.

The preview feature is a usability mistake. Hover is not a user intentional action, So why do you treat it as such when to do so is a problem?

When typing into a text field and user thumb happens to touch the trackpad, pushing the cursor over another in active tab, that should not interfere with user intentional action of typing into that text field. But it does. And not only does it provide a visual distraction, it prevents the typing.

This is a bug.Perhaps we should call it, oh I don’t know, “mouse over preview prevents typing”.

But you’re going to have an explosion of mouse over preview related bugs, for what? So that you can carry-on with the featured problem?

Mouse over feature problem is a bug.

Mouse over preview problem causes many other problems.

One other problem that that problem causes is the timing issue that is shown in the screenshot I posted on both closed bugs. That happens with moving the cursor across the Tab strip, Activating a tab (by clicking on it), and then seeing the wrongDocuments loaded. I know brave is a new browser so there’s bound to be some bugs but this is a new feature introduced by Brave. Do you think chrome, Microsoft, or Apple would ship such bugs? Try to imagine a Safari release that did that.

You are being dismissive and not acknowledging the severity of this problem.

The most logical course of action is to acknowledge that mouse over preview problem is a bug that needs to be fixed. The way to fix it is to remove it.

I don’t want to hear any other talk about how you can make it less bad, user preferences to address the problem, or any other euphemistic bull 💩 until the featured problem has been removed.

It’s clear that Brave doesn’t have anybody Who understands user interface design on board. The answer to, “we have a usability bug“ is not “we’ve created a separate configuration to help avoid this usability bug“. That is yet another usability problem. Get rid of the featured problem; eradicate it completely from the codebase. You’ll have less code, simpler code, fewer bugs, and you won’t have to deal with special configuration settings to deal with your feature. (I remember a horribly complicated preferences manager for Firefox.)

[bsclifton]

@GarrettS your feedback is appreciated and has been passed on to the design team (I'll ask them to respond). As you noticed, I re-opened your original issue since there is a problem and tagged two developers, hoping they'd take a peek at it

If you don't like the feature, why haven't you disabled it yet? We definitely haven't gotten this much negative feedback before about it (it's been there for a long time). Starting with version 0.22.714, we had some refactorings which increased performance of the browser. Unfortunately, there were some bugs and we're actively trying to find and fix those bugs

We have a new Chromium based UI in the works (Brave Core) and you'll be pleased to know that it does not have tab preview (at least not yet- I created an issue to capture it with brave/brave-browser#275). If this feature is implemented there, maybe it can be an opt-in feature (ex: you have to enable it) instead of being enabled by default