GNOME &nerdy stuff reinout | 08 Feb 2011 11:57 pm
Gnome 3: tab scrolling, and some other remarks
Last week I spent a little time testing GNOME 3 on the Fedora test day.
In general, things are shaping up nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that I had no 3D driver issues any more on either of my two laptops (using the free intel and radeon drivers). Some things are not ready for prime time, such as dconf-editor that doesn’t provide a search option and doesn’t wrap long description labels, thereby forcing the window width to ridiculous proportions (bug 641292).
However, one issue that’s really spoiling my user experience is the removal of mousewheel tab scrolling from GtkNotebook. Apparently, this feature can give unexpected effects when your mousewheel is over-sensitive. I can even understand that one would want this to be off by default for new users. But to completely remove tab scrolling, something that people have come to rely upon over the years, without an option to turn it back on, is harsh.
To quote from the bug:
If the problem is that the mouse wheel can be too sensitive leading to unexpected tab switches, IMHO the solution is to have a treshold by default, much like drag-and-drop.
I would really want the functionality to stay in GTK. If there are really good reasons fro some not to want this, I'd suggest a GtkSetting (that gnome's UI configurator would show), controlling mouse wheel support for Notebooks, ComboBox and other stuff (for consistency).
The end result of this change is that some applications are just implementing the functionality themselves now that it's been removed from Gtk+: Which unfortunately results in inconsistant user interface... Tab scrolling works in some programs but not others.
Although this issue certainly won’t cause any melting laptops — please guys. Give me a break and provide a setting to re-enable this.
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on 09 Feb 2011 at 1:56 1.mike said …
This is really nuts, show me one person who is confused by this..
And if they want to run great software, can’t one expect at least decent hardware from them?…
For me, if I make the effort to use the mouse for whatever reason, I think it would be great to have it be as powerful as possible; this seems to be on line with keyboard shortcuts, so I think it is a very good thing.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 10:07 2.Stefano Teso said …
Agreed. One of the things that impressed me when first using GNOME was this little feature.
Quickly switching between tab labels (in, e.g., epiphany) without having to accurately position the mouse over the tab I want to switch to — without having to even _look_ at the little tab label! — is just, well, great! It makes so much sense.
Now that it has been removed from GTK I feel a bit lost. I’m all for a setting to re-enable it, while keeping it off by default.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 10:49 3.oliver said …
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! Probably I wouldn’t have noticed it until its too late.
Sigh… life really is a struggle – now we can’t even _keep_ a good desktop environment without fighting for it :-/
on 09 Feb 2011 at 12:19 4.Chris Lord said …
While I don’t have any strong feelings about this, I do miss the feature, and I agree that it’s inconsistent to turn it off for tabs, but not for things like combo-boxes (which can also have an immediate effect).
on 09 Feb 2011 at 12:19 5.Stu said …
+1 for keeping this.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 12:57 6.Name said …
Speaking of important features: Will there ever be a fix to the bug that no single click is available in gtk file chooser dialog? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121113
on 09 Feb 2011 at 13:32 7.pancake said …
Thanks for noticing, I also find this feature very useful, and it’s something I hate from QT or Firefox tabs..
I want this back.. at least configurable.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 14:46 8.Stephen Gentle said …
I also love being able to scroll tabs with the scroll wheel. This feature is a must imo.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 15:08 9.valentin said …
I really don’t understand why the hell developers have to continue to remove things.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 18:40 10.oOarthurOo said …
@valentin … it’s not the developers, its the designers. The developers are only to blame insofar and they don’t seem to have any ability to disagree with the designers decisions, other than to say “that’s too hard to code”.
But since it’s hard to use that excuse when stripping out features, they’re pretty much at the mercy of a few people who are super excited about the direction they’ve chosen.
I hear the Kool-Aid is delicious and refreshing.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 23:39 11.Duncan Lock said …
This is a real shame. Not having mouse wheel tab scrolling is one of my pet hates when I run non-native or non-gtk apps’s. Taking this out of GTK would be a real disservice to users.
on 09 Feb 2011 at 23:59 12.Hylke said …
If we would include an option for every feature removed or default changed, we would end up with KDE.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 0:37 13.oOarthurOo said …
@hylke: That makes zero sense. No one is complaining about all the features not being added; It’s about all the options being removed. By not removing them it magically turns into KDE? So current gnome is like kde.
And you’re a designer I gather? Isn’t that reassuring. That somone designing the next version of gnome has no understanding of the current differences between kde and gnome.
Either that, which I don’t believe, or you’re just reflexively dismissive of all criticism. Which frankly, isn’t much better, but probably closer to the truth.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 7:22 14.Mal said …
Who on earth gives the go-ahead for these decisions? Is it one or two people making the same stupid decisions over and over again? Even posts on Planet GNOME are complaining about this ongoing crippling of the DE. I wonder if anyone is listening, or if the two guys behind the curtain don’t think the users matter?
on 10 Feb 2011 at 9:54 15.reinout said …
@Hylke, nobody is asking for an extra checkbox in a control panel. The simple request is not to take away functionality that makes many of our lives easier every day, if only through a dconf setting.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 9:57 16.reinout said …
@oOarthurOo, if you had taken the time to read the actual bug report, you would have known it was a core GTK+ developer advocating this change, not a designer. I for one am very thankful for the hard work that people on the design team have put into the GNOME 3 user experience.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 13:38 17.Stefano Teso said …
@Hylke: that’s not necessarily the case, if the configuration is hidden in dconf-editor. I don’t really see that as a problem.
And code-wise, the patch is ~100 LOCs (sans dconf support). AFAICS it doesn’t really add any complexity in any case.
What I don’t get, and I’d like an answer to, is: why removing a feature that is clearly being used by some users (a niche, if you want) instead of just changing the defaults while still providing a dconf key to enable it? Please add a comment to bugzilla.
Thanks.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 19:17 18.Greg K Nicholson said …
If some mouses or track-pads scroll too quickly, we should fix the problem properly: figure out how to detect that, and then reduce the scroll speed.
It’s daft to remove a useful interaction just to fix a minor symptom of a much wider problem.
Have there been user interaction studies showing that this behaviour is a big problem? Or feedback on the web? Bug reports?
on 10 Feb 2011 at 20:10 19.oOarthurOo said …
@reinout: Didn’t read the bug report, just followed Hylkes website link to his page, based on activity I saw there assumed he was involved in gnome design.
Thanks for correction.
on 10 Feb 2011 at 20:14 20.rwt said …
This feature drives me insane. I hate it. It makes GtkNotebook have unexpected surprises on a laptop, which has a scroll area on the edge of the trackpad; or if I’m scrolling a terminal with the wheel and my cursor happens to fall into the wrong spot.
The gnome panel window list applet also has the same trap, and also is incredibly annoying.
A dconf key would be fine, but this shouldn’t be a UI-visible option.
on 11 Feb 2011 at 15:13 21.Anonymous said …
I _love_ that feature and I always have to install a firefox addon for it to work in the browser. Now it’s even gone in gnome? Bring it back please!
on 11 Feb 2011 at 15:49 22.oliver said …
rwt: yes, when using a touchpad this feature is not very useful for me as well; but on a desktop system with a normal mouse, it’s very valuable. That’s why it would make sense to make this an option. I think it’s not very considerate to completely remove a feature just because some people have broken or inappropriate hardware for it.
Btw. the window list applet scrolling is useless for me both with touchpad and mouse; but that’s because scrolling there cannot be “undone” completely – this is different for tab bar scrolling.
on 23 Sep 2011 at 18:44 23.khaal said …
Removing this was nuts. One thing that stopped me to move back to kde after the 4th revolution was the lack of tab-scrolling. Now gnome 3 is suffering from this… gah!
Anyone know what the status of this is, if its something that the gnome devs acknowleged as a issue that they’ll re-implement?
on 25 Sep 2011 at 0:18 24.reinout said …
@khaal There’s a patch in this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145244 but it hasn’t gotten much attention yet.
on 01 Sep 2012 at 2:03 25.James said …
I very much miss this feature. Hopefully you can email all the commenters when someone finds a way to enable this. I’ve put a lot of effort into “swallowing” gnome3, and after a dozen extensions and other tweaks, I’m basically almost as happy as I was with gnome2. Until I realized this wasn’t working anymore… So let us know if you ever find a solution… or a petition!
Thanks,
James