Enhancement: MouseWheel support in TabSet

[Blama]

Hi Isomorphic,

I just opened many samples in the showcase and noticed that the TabSet does not support left/right scrolling with the mouse. I'm used to Firefox, which supports this. IMO it is a good feature, but it seems to be different in every browser-UI.

1. Firefox 26 native tab: Minimum Tab width, soft scrolling with mouse-wheel or with mouse-pointer via arrow click. Additional "Select Tab" dropdown.
2. IE 11 native tab: Minimum Tab width, hard scrolling one-by-one via arrow click with the mouse only.
3. Chrome 39: No minimum Tab width. Every tab clickable.

I like the FF way the best and SmartGWT is doing it exactly like this - only the mousewheel-scrolling, which I'm using a lot in Firefox, is missing.

I'm using that many SmartGWT Tabs in the showcase only, so this has no priority for me, but I thought you might wanted to know anyway.

Best regards,
Blama

[Isomorphic]

Can you clarify what you're talking about:

1. you say "mouse wheel", but are you really talking about horizontal scrolling, as with a trackpad or similar?

2. do you mean scrolling of the TabBar area or the pane? If the pane, are you talking about being able to scrolling horizontally to change the selected tab?

3. what is "soft scrolling"?

[Blama]

Hi Isomorphic,

1/2) Yes, I'm talking about horizontal scrolling of the TabSet's top TabBar when the TabSet contains more Tabs than it can display together.

3) Soft (animated) scrolling like normal scrolling in the browser compared to state change.
In IE 11 with many native browser Tabs the browsers "TabBar" switches its display (state change) instead of animating the change like Firefox does with its native tabs or like you do with SmartGWT's TabBar.

The enhancement is to add MouseWheel event handlers to start the horizontal scrolling like when you click the "left" or "right" arrow with the mouse. Firefox supports this for its native browser tabs.

Best regards,
Blama

[Isomorphic]

OK, we see what you're after, but we're not sure that any of these behaviors are worth adding (which may explain why each browser behaves differently).

The user expectation may well be that horizontal scrolling affects whatever is in the tab pane rather than the tabBar itself, even if keyboard focus is in the tabBar. If we do something like scrolling the tab pane if it has horizontal scrolling available, otherwise scroll the tabBar, that seems even worse.

Tabling this for now until and unless a clearly good behavior emerges.