OBVIOUS VISIBILITY Current Tab

[AlainK]

Dear Sir/Madam,

I thank you for creating a noticeably faster browser.
So far, I have switched from chrome & firefox, to brave, and have not needed to go back, except for small web video issues here and there. These are mostly related to features, such as chrome’s previews of videos.

My feature request is this:

I oftentimes use more than 40 different tabs, going back and forth between them, both while working or looking up information.
The thing noticed, is that with brave, it’s not obvious-at-first-glance, which is the active tab. Neither maximized, or windowed - which is even worse.
Why not create an obvious, larger, even bright blinking tab-name option, or something which obviously stands out on a high-resolution 27 inch or larger screen, with lots and lots of tabs?

Thank you for your time.

[Mattches]

@AlainK,
Thank you for reaching out to us. I’m not entirely sure I understand your request though. It sounds like you’re having an issue telling which tab is active when you have many (40+) tabs open in one window – is that correct?
If so, observe the following images:

I have ~60 tabs open in this window – can you tell which one is active? I imagine yes, you can. At least from my perspective, it seems quite obvious which tab is highlighted/brighter than the others.

Here’s that same session in Dark mode with a different active tab. Again – can you tell which one is active? It should be fairly clear.

Is the contrast displaying differently for you? Can you share a screenshot?

[AlainK]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.
Yes I am having trouble quickly identifying the active tab.

Is it possible for your developers, to make the active tab more obvious?

As it is, I really have to look for it. With chrome and firefox, I think it is easier, because the active tab/tab bar, is larger; so easier to spot quickly. Perhaps you could make just the active tab obviously larger and brighter than the surrounding tabs?

Thanking you in advance.

Sincerely,

Alain Koningverdraag

[Mattches]

@AlainK,
Again – active tabs are colored differently than inactive ones. As shown in my image above, even with a large number of tabs open (such that the tabs themselves are very small so they fit in the Window) it should be fairly obvious which tab is the active tab.

This becomes even more apparent when less tabs are open in the Window:
Active tab w/light theme

Active tab w/Dark theme

[dragonlord666]

realise this is an old thread but I have the current version of Brave ( Version 1.5.115 Chromium: 80.0.3987.149 (Official Build) (64-bit)) on a mac running mojave. I also find it impossible to tell what tab is active. would it not be possible to have it so we can set it so only active tab as the X close button or something

I would attach a pic but have no idea how to - sorry

[xtend]

Hi @Mattches, I second @AlainK and @dragonlord666. I know the active tab is slightly lighter than the other tabs but where the tabs reside at the top of my screen (on different machines/screens), the tabs fall into a dim area that makes the reduces the contrast between the different tabs.

Part of this is likely due to a user’s screen brightness settings (if I max out my screen brightness, they are easier to distinguish), however, I keep my brightness a bit lower for reading comfort and reduced eye strain and some screens are just dimmer based on manufacturer design. I also noticed that how prone to reflection the screen is impacts visibility (it seems screens with a reflective surface make it even harder to noticed the active tab contrast).

I took some screen shots but they don’t do the lack of contrast justice as the screen shots look pretty good but in reality the difference is really hard to notice on my screen:

As a possible solution, an active tab could be highlighted similar to how the url/search bar is highlighted with an orange border when you click in it:

Finally, when searching here for an answer, one other suggestion was to turn on the experimental “tab groups” in brave://flags. I tried that but it doesn’t really help: tab groups are highlighted but the active tab within the group is still hard to distinguish (plus adding things to each groups is kind of clunky as you have to right click in the group itself - it would be better if you could lick a “+” within the group or ctrl+T would open a new tab in the active group rather than another ‘default’ tab).

[dragonlord666]

Another way to do this would be to NOT have the close X in every tab, only the active tab, this would help make it stand out

it gets even harder to find the active tab if you have a lot of tabs open at once. the smaller the tab the harder it is to see which is active.

I’ve given up and just have to click each tab until Find the one that was active.

[xtend]

I think that’s a great solution as well.

Interestingly, I just opened a bunch of tabs and noticed that after you open 16 tabs, only the active tab has the close X. If you have 15 tabs or less open, all tabs have the close X (the close X also reappears once you close back down to 15 tabs if you had more open).

Edit: Actually, there’s a downside: a lot of users won’t like that solution. If Brave takes off the X from inactive tabs, then users would have to activate each inactive tab to close it rather than just hitting the X.

[dragonlord666]

unless said users right click and select close tab

[xtend]

True but I think people won’t like the extra step to close an inactive tab. Really, it seems all the suggestions we’ve offered would work. Of the suggestions, I’m guessing changing the active tab color (make it contrast better) is probably the easiest to code but the dev’s would know best on that.

[dragonlord666]

different colour would be best, but seems they are ignoring us

[xtend]

It doesn’t help when this thread doesn’t seem to be populating in the category: https://community.brave.com/c/brave-feature-requests/. I could only get it to show up by clicking the “Activity” sort but I think it just turns up there because it was my latest activity which means other users won’t see it. Hopefully, some of the people tagged in the replies will notices (especially mattches).
I wonder if it would be better to start over and post this as a new feature request in the category.

[dragonlord666]

might be worth posting as a new feature request.
mind you a lot of people are also saying Brave has suddenly stopped spell checking in UK english and reverts back to US english…. they all seem to be being ignored too. the ’solution’ that was posted doe snot work as the menu items are not there etc.