1005649 - Move new tab '+' to current focus tab

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[rik]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140421221237

Steps to reproduce:

Product change request. Move the new tab '+' icon to the current focused tab. It can appear to the left of the 'x' close tab icon. This reduces the number of characters in the tab's title, but it's the tab that's been selected so that should not be a concern. The other non-selected tabs should remain with just the 'x' close tab icon. When the new tab '+' icon is selected the new tab should appear to the immediate right of the selected tab. Focus should transfer to the new tab by default.


Actual results:

Product change request see above.


Expected results:

Product change request see above. Having the capability to make a new tab from the context of the current tab and having that new tab appear to the immediate right of the current tab would improve firefox's behavior. The idea of a new tab mostly  occurs while engaged in the content of the current tab. This establishes a relationship between the current tab and the new tab in most cases. The association is reinforced by having the '+' new tab icon available in the current tab's tab and having the new tab appear to the immediate right of the current tab. Even when there is not a cognitive relationship between the tabs, there is at least a temporal one. This feature request would result in an interface that would be more intuitive and most functional with respect to supporting cognitive or temporal relationships.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Blake, do you know if we have plans for this and/or want to implement this? :-)

Comment 2

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

I'm pretty sure we don't have any plans for this, and it's a far more complicated feature request than it may seem at first.

While I'm here, I'ld like to offer a couple of arguments against putting this feature in Firefox:

1) Further reducing the number of characters in the selected tab is an anti-goal, since I know that we are looking into ways of showing _more_ characters there instead.

2) It would astronomically increase the chances of mis-clicking, and either closing a tab you didn't want to, or opening yet another tab when you wanted to close the current one.

3) We don't have any data that supports the assertion that the idea of a new tab mostly occurs while engaged in the content of the current tab, so designing for that assumption doesn't seem like a great idea.  (If you open a link in a new tab, we do put that immediately beside the current tab, since there's an obvious connection there.)


Having said all that, it's definitely an interesting idea, and if you (Rik) wanted to try to write an add-on I would be more than happy to give you a hand!  Then, we could see how popular it was, and if enough people preferred it, we could certainly talk about making that behaviour the default…