1383669 - Option to change default tab behaviors within Fx China repack

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Hector Zhao [:hectorz]]

Beijing office ships an extension named Tab Tweak[1], to change certain default tab behaviors, to match other popular Chinese browsers and users' expectations.

Basically, it will require the APIs proposed and denied in bug 1246706 and bug 1270763 to be migrated to a WebExtension.

We'd like these to be considered for implementation as about:config prefs, for a partner distribution like Fx China repack to flip, thanks.

For reference:
* Double click a tab to close it: 360 secure browser, QQ browser, 2345 browser & Cheetah browser (Kingsoft);
* Open the searchengine result in new tab instead of current tab: 360 secure browser, QQ browser & Sogou browser;
* Open the bookmark/history entry in new tab instead of current tab: 360 secure browser & Sogou browser.

We can already flip the "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" pref to close the last tab to get a new tab.

[1]: https://github.com/MozillaOnline/tabtweak

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I suppose we would take patches for these things, but it would need to be driven by Mozilla Online engineers.

Comment 2

[Andy McKay]

I think these should have clear indications in about:preferences as well so that users will be clear that an extension has changed this behaviour. Otherwise we'll be changing core Firefox behaviour with no clear user indication.

Comment 3

[Andrei Petcu]

Will the tab double click mouse event be accessible by any WebExtension or just by some extension approved by Mozilla similarly as how Cliqz or Containers work?

Comment 4

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

Per an email from Shell:

*  Next set of patches will expose desired behavior as preferences that Fx will respect.  The China distro will set them with the distro files.
*  They do not expect to depend upon them being made available to a WebExtension API. 
*  If those Tab configurable preferences are exposed via WE or not is PM call once they are there

Comment 5

[Hector Zhao [:hectorz]]

Resolving this bug as FIXED. As of the latest version (5.61), our TabTweak extension is just flipping these prefs.