Potential feature: per-tab active/inactive status (e.g. for A/B testing)

[arrowtype]

(Will clean this issue up later ... just taking notes)

Desired interaction:

• Persists between navigation on one tab
• Doesn’t override all tabs, or new tabs

Questions:

• Could the override settings persist when I open a new tab, then open Type-X, but also be edited/changed in different tabs, without affecting others?
• Could the icon show the "active" status (colorful icon) only for tabs where it is active, then gray out on new/other tabs? Like, when I change to a tab in which the extension is active, would the icon gray out?

This feature idea comes from https://github.com/arrowtype/type-x/issues/32:

@davelab6:

@csimpkins and @gorjious discussed with me today that Gor is using Chrome and Chrome Canary to be able to run 2 tabs/windows with 2 versions of the same family to A/B test. It would be good to support such A/B testing without a 2nd browser :)

@gorjious:

If watching for changes on a local file are blocked maybe there can simply be a stationary refresh/update button which when clicked that will reload the file (whether it has changed or not). This will at least save a few clicks and menu selections.

If it does become possible to do A/B testing in the same browser then this manual updating can be useful. For example, if there are two identical tabs then one can have an updated version and the other an un-updated version. This will allow for quick exporting and then switching between versions.

[arrowtype]

A (much simpler) extension that can be activated in one tab, but not all, is WhatFont. However, it doesn’t change the icon for active vs inactive tabs. Instead, it shows a little "floaty" status indicator / exit button when it is active.

The point of Type-X is to set overrides, then recede from view to allow natural reading & browsing. So, a floaty indicator would probably be non-ideal. Maaaybe it would be okay somewhere like a triangle in the extreme top-left or top-right corners. However, this would still obstruct some sites, and would also mess up screenshots.

[RoelN]

It might be possible to change the icon per tab, according to whether it's activated or not.

Type-X original way of working as that it worked for the entire browser, so you could turn it on once, and then surf the enitre web with your font: current tab, new tabs, already open tabs. If we go to have the extension work per-tab, which technically is possible, you lose this feature. You'll have to turn it on explicitly for every tab. Question is then, which font configuration will it use to initiate the new tab? Fonts of the current tab?

[gorjious]

Just dropping a couple of thoughts on the per-tab idea. I am usually using Type-X for testing on a single website but when I have to switch to another non-related tab I will turn Type-X off. This switching between On/Off is the reason I now use Canary as the sort of 'dedicated' Type-X testing browser.

I think it would be a good thing to have the ability to turn it on explicitly for every tab. So then the user can have two independent tabs with the same website...each can be loaded with the same font, and then when a change is made in the font editor and new fonts are exported, the user can select a tab, click a reload button to update only that tab then be able to easily switch back and forth between tabs to evaluate changes between old and new versions.

If there is a new tab opened, I think it makes sense to have it be the website default (Type-X = off). This again ties with using Type-X for testing and switching between testing and non-testing related tabs.

One more idea which may be outside of the Type-X scope is if it is possible for per-tab to do A/B testing...how could a user sync two tabs with the same website to have the same scroll position (say if the testing portion is halfway down the page)? Maybe a Sync button? But perhaps something like this would be better to use an additional extension.