456425 - close-last-tab should show about:blank before closing window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Bug 392870 altered the behavior of closing the last tab in a window. The window now closes when you close the last tab in a window.

Half baked idea:

When closing the last tab, only close the window if the tab was about:blank. If it was not about:blank, closing the tab should change the tab location to about:blank (and, thus, closing the tab again would close the window). Eg:

site.com --> about:blank --> window closes.

My ingrained task is to use Command-W (or clicking the tab close icon) as a way to indicate I'm done with the current tab... The next tab is then displayed, or if it was the last tab it was (previously) simply cleared with a blank page. Now it feels surprising to sometimes have the window close when I do this. Transitioning through about:blank would be a way to retain this use case, while still allowing close-last-tab to close the window when it makes sense to.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

This would do it... the patch applies on top of the patch in bug 456002.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Dup of bug 456405?

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Not quite. Bug 456405 asks for site.com --> about:blank, but not for about:blank --> window closes.

Comment 4

[Jay Rossiter]

This behavior needs to be selectable.  I do NOT want the browser to close simply because I closed a tab.  The behavior is completely counter-intuitive and breaks workflow that many users have had for years.

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> This behavior needs to be selectable.  I do NOT want the browser to close
> simply because I closed a tab.

browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab=false would still be an option.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: hide the blank tab until the old tab is gone

Comment 7

[Jay Rossiter]

I'm not sure what you mean by "still", Dao, because that's not an option now.  There's nothing in the UI, and even adding the value by hand doesn't change the behavior.  If that's going to be added, great, but I can't see that mentioned anywhere in any of the related bugs that I've found.

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I'm not sure what you mean by "still", Dao, because that's not an option now.

It is, as of bug 455852.

Comment 9

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

can is counterworkflow tiem nao? (I guess this is about the keyboard case only since clicks on a tab closing the window seems wrong no matter how many clicks there were.)

Personally, I prefer to have ctrl-w clean up everything it can without disturbing other documents, right away. If I want a blank window I'll ask for one tyvm :) and even then I'll do that only in order to take it to some site, which is not the next step I'm implying with ctrl-w; if it were what I wanted to do I'd have already gone ahead with it without an intermediate step closing things.

The risk with immediate window close in the comment 0 flow choosing between ctrl-w and nothing is losing a blank window, recoverable with opening a new window. The risk with intervening about:blank in my flow choosing between ctrl-w and ctrl-ww (sure that'll get ingrained dealing with enough single-tab windows) is losing a tab I care about, recoverable with tab close undo. Neither of those seems too bad.

Comment 10

[u88484]

I can't find where I put this comment before but here it goes again.

If I explicitly told that tab to close, I do not want it to open up again when I start Firefox.  Of course this happens when there is only one window open and sessionstore is enabled...which is probably how most users browse.  Even if not, I told the tab to close so don't open the window back up with that tabs content showing again.

Comment 11

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> If I explicitly told that tab to close, I do not want it to open up again when
> I start Firefox.

The patch in bug 456002 fixes that.

Comment 12

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 339856 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

While well intentioned, I think that this sort of behaviour will only make sense to someone who's followed the path of bugs that's gotten us to here.

Ctrl/Cmd-W has and will always mean "close". What people seem to be looking for is the ability to "clear tab but keep browser open" which I think is (a) a highly optimized and uncommon use case (that isn't to say it isn't *someone's* use case, just not one that's very common) and (b) still supported by the about:config pref.

If the concern is clearing visual real estate, users can set their homepage to about:blank and click that. If the concern is clearing back/forward history then we should be looking into per-tab clear private data. Overloading the "close" command this way feels like it's just going to be more confusing than good.

Comment 13

[u88484]

Mike, but as others have said in the past, Firefox is an MDI and closing the last document never closes the application...at least on windows.  

How about we do some work about:blank to give it some content like recently starred/bookmarked pages, recently closed tabs and maybe even a search engine box?  Giving about:blank some content would make it not seem useless and give a reason why the browser did not close...unexpectedly may I add.

Comment 14

[Γριφεγ]

Recently starred pages are not used very often, and are already accessible from the bookmarks menü. Same for recently closed tabs from the history menü. Firefox already has a search engine box right next to the location bar. These would all be redundant on the about:blank page.

As for closing a tab the user might want to do two things, close Firefox, or visit a different site. Yes many inexperienced users do have doubts about entering an URL into the address bar of an other page. What will it do? Does it cause anything bad? I am asked this very often. They are used to close the site (app?) they were using before navigating elsewhere.

If closing the last tab will close Firefox, please make starting Firefox again significantly faster (no slower than opening a new tab), because users will need to do this very often.

Comment 15

[u88484]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Recently starred pages are not used very often, and are already accessible from
> the bookmarks menü. Same for recently closed tabs from the history menü.
> Firefox already has a search engine box right next to the location bar. These
> would all be redundant on the about:blank page.
> 
Not use often because users can't find them hidden in the library.  I filed bug 457034 about about:blank.  Lets take the comments there.

Comment 16

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to comment #13)
> Mike, but as others have said in the past, Firefox is an MDI and closing the
> last document never closes the application...at least on windows.  
> 
> How about we do some work about:blank to give it some content like recently
> starred/bookmarked pages, recently closed tabs and maybe even a search engine
> box?  Giving about:blank some content would make it not seem useless and give a
> reason why the browser did not close...unexpectedly may I add.

If you think about:blank is too empty, then maybe about: instead? Or else, the user's home page (if not a multitab homepage), whose default IIUC is Google?

However, in other MDIs like OOwrite or Acrobat Reader, when I close the last or only document what I get is a blank page.

Comment 17

[Γριφεγ]

>However, in other MDIs like OOwrite or Acrobat Reader, when I close the last or
only document what I get is a blank page.

Wait, that just means Adobe and Sun has competent UI designers.

What's worrying is that former versions of Firefox worked like that too, where do I sign up to the "If the Firefox 3.0 UI isn't broke, don't fix it" petition?

Comment 18

[u88484]

(In reply to comment #17)
> >However, in other MDIs like OOwrite or Acrobat Reader, when I close the last > >or only document what I get is a blank page.
> Wait, that just means Adobe and Sun has competent UI designers.
Let's not insult the developers.  It won't get us anywhere.  Just let this bug sit for a couple of days.  There are a few other bugs open that should make this one obsolete.

Comment 20

[Phil Dibowitz]

Just wanted to also say that it would be nice to be able to close the last tab to blank it. This is a common workflow I use and so do many of the people I see at my office.

I don't understand why some folks here seem to think that I would treat the last tab any differently than the rest of the tabs. When I'm done with a tab a close it, plain and simple. I want to be able to close the last tab but leave the browser open.

Comment 21

[Dorus Peelen]

For a slightly more scientific (fact driven) argumentation, I'd like to point at 
http://dubroy.com/blog/2009/01/29/my-talk-at-mozilla/
people use tabs as reminders and to-do list's. At least I often do that. And what good is a to-do list if you can't clear the last task from your list to make your mind clean for the next one?

As I currently have Firefox set to hide the tab bar with only 1 window open, I work around this by keeping 1 additional tab with my startpage in it, but I know a few people that use the clear last tab for this instead.