1388462 - Extend tabs API with new options for tabs.remove

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Geoffrey De Belie (Smile4ever)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20170731100325

Steps to reproduce:

An API to close the tabs to the right / left of the current tab would be useful for Tab Center Redux. It would need to keep in acccount the setting browser.tabs.warnOnCloseOtherTabs and display a warning to the user if needed, just like the function is called when using right mouse on a tab in the tab bar.

This is an alternative approach / workaround for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376394

Maybe this extension to the tabs API would need an option to suppress the warning from browser.tabs.warnOnCloseOtherTabs (when using this code unattended - no user interaction allowed). This option is optional however, since you can do this by closing the tabs one by one by calling tabs.remove().

Suggested API usage:
browser.tabs.closeTabsToTheRight(optionalTabId);

optionalTabId = currentTabId as default.

Never prompt API usage:
browser.tabs.closeTabsToTheRight(optionalTabId, {prompt: false});

More info:
https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux/issues/93

Comment 1

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

I don't really like the API calls suggested, but I do think we could do something similar...

browser.tabs.remove(listOfIDs, optionsObject)

listOfIDs may be empty depending on optionsObject entries

optionsObject = {
  allExcept, //boolean, closes all except listOfIDs
  all, //boolean closes all tabs
  right, //boolean, closes all to right
  left, // boolean, closes all to left
  prompt, // boolean
  ...other options?...
}

Comment 2

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

Lets hash out the details here enough to make a decision.  If we approve this, we'll close bug 1376394

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

nit: avoid the terms left/right as they're not RTL-safe. The tabbrowser method is called removeTabsToTheEndFrom for that reason.

Comment 4

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

sure, could be toStart and toEnd.

simplifying a touch:

optionsObject = {
  option: allExcept | all | toEnd | toStart
  prompt: boolean
}

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

What's the use case for toStart? tabbrowser doesn't currently offer this.

Also, how would you handle the allExcept or toEnd options when listOfIDs contains multiple ids?

Comment 6

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

allExcept would remove all tabs except those in listOfIDs (and maybe current tab?).  If listOfIDs is empty, it would remove all except the current tab.

toEnd/toStart would remove starting from current tab, or listOfIDs[0] if provided.  we can either rely on docs or throw an error if more than one id is in the list.

OP requested both toEnd and toStart.

Comment 7

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi all, this has been added to the agenda for the August 22 WebExtensions APIs triage meeting. Geoffrey, would you be able to join us? 

Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Contribute/Triage#Next_Meeting

Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11SdY-aRhvPU3SvH8jpj0covj3Teq9_GJl8wMeEeSVwo/edit#

Comment 8

[Geoffrey De Belie (Smile4ever)]

Summary (mainly from the meeting)
* This API would greatly simplify API usage in many WebExtensions to bulk remove/delete certain tabs (left/right/whatever)
** This might improve performance (not needing to query the tabs API).
* CTRL+Shift+T (native Firefox shortcut to restore tabs) would reopen all closed tabs at once
* The "prompt" parameter can be used as a confirmation for the user. Implementing the prompt parameter obsoletes bug 1376394

(In reply to comment 1)
> 
> optionsObject = {
>  allExcept, //boolean, closes all except listOfIDs
>  all, //boolean closes all tabs
>  right, //boolean, closes all to right
>  left, // boolean, closes all to left
>  prompt, // boolean
>  ...other options?...
>}

Optional (array of?) windowId (as first parameter) to limit "all" or "allExcept"?

Comment 9

[Andy McKay]

On the assumption that this API works well with Ctrl+Shift+T, this would be a neat thing to have. I think its easy enough for an extension to calculate all the tabs, above, below, left, right, or whatever of a certain point and we should leave that to the extension author. A tree style tabs implementation as an example would be "everything in this tree". As such we should let close(...) take a list of tabIds instead of just one. I don't think there's any need for any more complicated logic than that.

I would split the prompt? into a seperate bug so any discussion of how to closing a tab should work can occur in that bug.

Comment 10

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Geoffrey, this has been added to the agenda for the WebExtensions APIs triage on April 3, 2018. Would you be able to join us? 

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect at the triage: 

* We normally spend 5 minutes per bug
* The more information in the bug, the better
* The goal of the triage is to give a general thumbs up or thumbs down on a proposal; we won't be going deep into implementation details

Relevant Links: 

* Wiki for the meeting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Triage#Next_Meeting
* Meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H1ZEWf7dmyyu7NZZL90TkbyaUTjbdIK3TUEtO_vff34/edit#
* Vision doc for WebExtensions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Vision

Comment 11

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

This is being narrowed down to:

- pass list of id's to tabs.remove and an option to prevent prompting
- prompts probably shouldn't be shown from background operations also

Comment 12

[erosman]

Note: If I understand this correctly, getting IDs of Tabs to the left/right is quite easy without the need for extra API. (I have already been doing it for multiple purposes in FoxyTab)

Comment 13

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk move of bugs per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1483958