[iPad] No way to stop address/tab bar from auto hiding

[abodea]

Please note that I moved this bug from Bugzilla.

Steps to reproduce

I use a lot of tabs on the iPad, and the act of opening, closing, and switching tabs is inconsistent and hard to use on this version. Long pressing a link to open a new tab which I intend to switch to immediately.

Expected behavior

The behavior should be consistent regardless, and the option to auto-hide the tab bar should be a user-accessible toggle option. also about: the config appears to be blocked so I cannot change the option myself if it exists.

Actual behavior

What actually happens is inconsistent, sometimes the new tab is displayed on an unhidden tab bar, and sometimes the tab bar stays hidden. Sometimes I have to scroll to the top of the page to display the tab bar again, and sometimes the tab bar displays on a short scroll up.

Device & build information

• Device: iPad mini 6 (iOS 15.3.1)
• Build version: 97.0

Notes

Attachments:

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[abodea]

Note from QA: we don't consider this as a bug but the behavior can be improved by, revealing the URL bar when opening a link via long-press and revealing the switch to tab toast button. Also, note that i tried and the same behavior can be found on any browser, as the link is opened in a new tab but the user is not redirected to the newly opened tab.

[DiThi]

I have this issue or something related: scrolling in some pages is very glitchy because the constant attempt of resizing the viewport. I could avoid all these problems if I could disable the auto hide feature like I did in Android.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale. Has the issue been fixed, or does it still require the community's attention? Please leave any comment to keep this issue opened. It will be closed automatically if no further update occurs in the next 30 days. Thank you for your contributions!

[struq]

This is still not available in latest v116.1 (33291). Neither are the tab switching and viewport resizing problems mentioned above fixed in other ways. The the switch to tab button seems to only appear on phones not tablets.

[maskari]

Seconding this request, it is very annoying not being able to switch tabs quickly because of the aggressive auto hide behaviour

[mliudev]

This is also becoming an increasing annoyance for me as well. The auto hide behavior used to be much more consistent but now it will unhide even when scrolling down.

[sryze]

For me its behavior is not too much annoying, it's just that I'd like to avoid having to scroll up every time I want to click something on the tab bar/address bar because it seems to always hide after I scroll down. So +1 for adding an option to turn this off.

[userse31]

Hell, I'm on an iPhone and this crap where firefox automatically hides the bar is p*** me off.

Especially when the page doesn't load. The only option is to go into multitasking and go back to the browser. THEN it comes back.

Whoever came up with the idea to hide the url bar in the first place needs their genitals kicked in.

[Aquind]

This is extremely frustrating. It is bad on android as well but worse on iOS and severely impacts usability. As someone with executive function and sensory disabilities it often makes it prohibitively unusable when I have to constantly scroll up and down. On an autistic level my visual senses become discombobulated and I have to take a break from all the scrolling. Not only does this impact day to day users but puts those with disabilities at a severe disadvantage. I have started using safari as an alternative browser and am still looking for a Firefox replacement on android.

[royda]

Dear team, please provide an option to disable any auto-hiding of the URL bar and tabs on tablets. My use case means that I'm routinely hopping about from page to page and from tab to tab and Firefox auto-hiding the bar is slowly driving me insane. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that this issue almost makes the app unusable for me. Thank you

EDIT: BTW, the above gripe also includes when video sites such as youtube load a video. Many times the bar will auto-hide. Not sure if that's site-specific coding, but if there's a fix please let me know.

[robob27]

Please add this. It's very annoying to have to scroll up to use the address/tab bar every time. The tiny amount of space it saves me on an iPad screen is not worth the annoyance at all.

[sryze]

Another related issue: If you click on a link that takes a while to load (e.g. slow Wi-Fi) and the address bar is currently hidden, you can't get it to show again by scrolling, it just won't appear. This is annoying as well. To work around it you can minimize and re-open Firefox.

[jaraddowning]

Can we at least get the behavior consistent? The current behavior is to unhide randomly. All we are asking is for a way to stop the hide, the current behavior is worse than nothing.