1161667 - Handle tab queues with Browser.EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Bug 840574 landed handling Browser.EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID - this bug is to ensure it works correctly when tab queues are enabled.

Comment 1

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

I'm moving this to v2.

mcomella: Could this be a mentor bug? From your experience in bug 840574: Is this used by many applications? How important is this?

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #1)
> mcomella: Could this be a mentor bug?

I think this would be a brief, medium difficulty mentor bug – the Intent receiving code and our EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID code is a bit messy.

To better scope the problem, an external link with EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID will open the page in an existing tab with the matching id, if it exists, otherwise open a new tab. However, if we strictly obey this with tab queues, multiple tabs in the queue can overwrite each other. I propose the first tab in the queue that matches a given ID should load in the existing tab and all others with that same ID will open new tabs (which kind of breaks the flag, but I don't see a better alternative).

> From your experience in bug 840574: Is
> this used by many applications? How important is this?

I'm honestly not sure how often it is used – I made a custom application to test this rather than finding one that already did this. From that perspective, I'd say probably not that important.

However, it could break work flows for app developers who expect this to just work so we'd probably look bad to users where Chrome would just do the right thing.

Comment 3

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #2)
> To better scope the problem, an external link with EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID will
> open the page in an existing tab with the matching id, if it exists,
> otherwise open a new tab. However, if we strictly obey this with tab queues,
> multiple tabs in the queue can overwrite each other. I propose the first tab
> in the queue that matches a given ID should load in the existing tab and all
> others with that same ID will open new tabs (which kind of breaks the flag,
> but I don't see a better alternative).

This is a good point. The problem with that is that this is totally not understandable by the user. For a user EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID is not visible. Maybe we could at least inject all the "previous" URLs for the application into the tab's history?

Comment 4

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #3)
> This is a good point. The problem with that is that this is totally not
> understandable by the user. For a user EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID is not visible.

Maybe the focus is less understandability but rather what the feature is supposed to do. I usually don't notice when an application is opening links in existing tabs so for me this feature serves to declutter my tabs tray.

Is the purpose the same for the average user? Are there applications that use it differently?

> Maybe we could at least inject all the "previous" URLs for the application
> into the tab's history?

If we're talking about decluttering, then this sounds like a better solution than mine.

What do you think? Is there another purpose I'm missing?

Comment 5

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Let's test it when we start to implement it. Currently I feel like EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID is just not made for tab queues and enforcing it might have undesirable results (Where are my queued tabs?). Normally every Intent fired is a context switch - I might not even care what tab is used. But with tab queues I expect all queued tabs to show up.

Comment 6

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