254981 - Single middle-click in the tab bar should open a new tab

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Martin F.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

The middle mouse button is used to open links, bookmarks etc. in a new tab and
to close a tab (when clicking a tab with the middle button) with a single click.
But to open a new tab by clicking in a free area in the tab bar a double-click
is needed.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Double-click on a free area on the tab bar to open a new tab.
Actual Results:  
A new tab is opened after the double-click.

Expected Results:  
When using the middle mouse button, a single click should suffice.

This bug may be related to bug 244692.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Opera has this feature.  When I use Opera, I often hit this feature accidentally
while I'm trying to close tabs.

Comment 2

[Martin F.]

Firefox 1.0PR (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
Firefox/0.10) interprets a middle-click followed by a left-click as a
doubleclick. But the middle mouse button alone has not an effect anymore.

Expected Results:
A single middle-click should open a new tab, too.

Comment 3

[Jonas Pfenniger]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

If we say that middle-click is for opening things,
middle-click on a tab shoud duplicate it, not close it.

Also the behavior of middle-clicking on a tab is not the same in Windows than in
Linux (tested with Firefox 0.9.3 in Fedora 2).
In windows it closes the tab, and in linux it tries to find some site (didn't
understand what site exactly, maybe Google's "Fell Lucky" of the page's title)

Comment 4

[Martin F.]

(In reply to comment #3)
> If we say that middle-click is for opening things,
> middle-click on a tab shoud duplicate it, not close it.

I wouldn't say it's for opening things, i would say it's for handling tabs :)
Opera does also close tabs on middle-clicking them. And closing tabs is probably
more often needed as duplicating.

Comment 5

[Oliver Saier]

I use it to reopen closed tabs (with tabmix plus)

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Double-click works, there's no reason to burn up a different button press for this.

Comment 7

[Martin F.]

WFM @ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0 :-)