1384251 - Ctrl-Shift-Tab doesn't work with "recently used order" setting

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Stephen Shankland]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Left default setting of "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" checked
2. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Tab to try to cycle backward through tabs


Actual results:

Ctrl-Tab cycled forward, but Ctrl-Shift-Tab did nothing

Un-checking "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" restores older Ctrl-Shift-Tab behavior.


Expected results:

Ctrl-Shift-Tab should move backward through tabs. But maybe this is disabled because there's no need to go to least recently used tab? Whatever the reason, my muscle memory was confused. (I'm not a fan of "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in any event.)

Comment 1

[paoltergeist]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
OS: Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya

Not sure if it's the intended behavior, but I could make it work with the following steps on both Firefox nightly "56.0a1 (2017-07-29) (64-bit)" and Firefox "54.0 (64-bit)":

1. Press Ctrl+Tab
2. Continue pressing only Ctrl  (to keep the switching tab UI)
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+Tab

It's not intuitive and it should work by just pressing Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Stephen Shankland from comment #0)
> But maybe this is disabled because there's no need to go to least recently used tab?

That's correct. It's not really clear what "move backward" would mean with "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" enabled.

Comment 3

[Asif Youssuff]

Saw that "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" was enabled in the release notes, and tried it out and ran into this bug. 

For what it is worth, I am using MATE right now, which defaults to "Ctrl+Tab cycles through windows in recently used order" -- the window stack order changes based on the last used windows, and they have no problem cycling backwards when adding shift as a modifier. 

Firefox already displays the recently used tabs in a stack -- the first tab following the first in the popup display is the first, and doing the shortcut while holding shift should simply go back one - if the user goes to the start of the stack and does the Ctrl+shift+tab shortcut again, it should go to the *least* used tab, and as a user goes backwards, should get closer to the tabs as they are more recently used. 

macOS also does the same thing as does MATE, as does Windows 10. This would be nice for platform consistency at least, since right now the shift modifier does nothing at all, whereas Firefox introduced multi-tab select (increasing some consistency) and since this is exactly how existing app/window switchers on supported OSes act. 

Please reconsider the current resolution of WONTFIX.

Comment 4

[fwollsen]

> Please reconsider the current resolution of WONTFIX.

+1

According to the wording of the preference switch: 

"Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" indicates that instead of cycling through the tabs in visual order, recently used order is used. 

Nowhere is it indicated that Ctrl+Shift+Tab doesn't cycle through the tabs in the opposite order. 

Claim: Adding the Shift-modifier in order to reverse a cycle-order is an ingrained expected behavior across platforms. 

Support of this claim:

1.
Previous discussion regarding stack ordering which is essentially "cycle through tabs in recently used order" implicitly assigns the Shift-modifier to cycle through the tabs in the reverse order: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178556

2.
When this broke back on Mac 14 years ago, it was also reported that the expected result from "Press Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab" is "Move to next/previous tab": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264787

3.
This is also the behavior of adding the Shift-modifier to the order of application switching in OSX (and most likely other platforms as well).

Instead of WONTFIX, maybe we can discuss a new preference that can be configured to be able to have `browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedOrder` set to true without radically changing the behavior of the Shift-modifier on tab-switching? Maybe `browser.ctrlTab.shiftReversesOrder` or similar?

> Not sure if it's the intended behavior, but I could make it work with the following steps on both Firefox nightly "56.0a1 (2017-07-29) (64-bit)" and Firefox "54.0 (64-bit)":
> 
> 1. Press Ctrl+Tab
> 2. Continue pressing only Ctrl  (to keep the switching tab UI)
> 3. Press Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Note that this workaround only works as long as the amount of tabs is equal to or fewer than the amount of previews that can be shown horizontally in the "Ctrl+Tab" / "previews" popup/overlay - otherwise, instead of the least used tab being selected, the n:th most recently used tab is selected, since only n tabs are shown in the popup/overlay.

Not also that if the tab bar overflows (ie enough tabs are opened for the tab bar to overflow), pressing Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens the "All Tabs panel" with a list of all window tabs. In all other cases, Ctrl+Shift+Tab doesn't do anything at all. 

These are two additional not-so-intuitive aspects of the new Ctrl+Shift+Tab behavior, which may require additional prefs to suppress if one simply wants to change the tab-cycling order from "visual" to "recently used" without involving new popups/overlays and a modified keyboard shortcut for the all tabs panel.

Comment 5

[Ambrose Li]

I also vote to reopen this bug. The resolution of WONTFIX makes no sense.

Comment 6

[etiennelg]

I was also about to open a bug because of this. Having Control+Shift+Tab disabled while the option "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" enabled makes no sense.