1459402 - [tracking] APIs to control behavior after tab closing

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Robert AB]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.139 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

The aim of this meta-bug is to group all bugs related to missing and available APIs to customize/control behavior after tab closing.

Here, it can be also the place to discuss what is the best way to support these APIs.


Actual results:

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Expected results:

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Comment 1

[tustamido]

From what I understand, extensions that want to control which tab to activate after closing must listen to multiple tab events, calling browser.tabs.moveInSuccession() or browser.tabs.update() all the time. This could be simplified if we had something like onBeforeTabClose so that extensions could set successorTabId just before the tab is removed.

Right before tab closing is the only moment extensions need to set successorTabId, it's not optimal that they need to track every onActivated, onMoved, onRemoved, onUpdated just because there's no way to anticipate that the tab is about to close.

Comment 2

[Ryan Hendrickson [rhendric on GitLab, GitHub]]

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1419947#c3 and nearby comments; one of the design inputs that led to browser.tabs.moveInSuccession was the constraint that closing a tab shouldn't block on any calls out to extensions before the next tab is activated.