(In reply to avada from comment #9)
(In reply to Denis Lisov from comment #2)
[a few sets of actions -> tab order groups]
I think all of these are reasonable. Except the one with closing the tab. Because if you not switch away from a tab to close it it should make no difference. (Though it works this way with the old xul FF + tab mix plus combination as well)
I don't agree with you.
That being said, I do understand what Firefox is trying to do with these sequences. The common logic behind them seems to be roughly summarized by the following two rules:
- if the user opens several tabs in a row without switching context, open them after the current left-to-right;
- when the user changes context, forget about the recently opened tabs and start from the current tab again.
The problem is that the difference between "the user changes context" and "the user keeps context" here is a heuristic that works good for some people and not so good for others. The two kinds of errors are both possible here: false negatives can happen when a person loses context due to a distraction Firefox does not know about (for example, they can do something in a different Firefox window, or in a non-Firefox one, be distracted by a trailer on their TV, receive a phone call, etc.) while false positives can happen when a user does something Firefox considers a distraction but still keeps the mental context (for example, they can switch to a different tab for a quick check that does not require much thinking, or they can come back to what they were reading and specifically recall what they'd seen and opened before switching away).
In both error cases the Firefox behavior is surprising to the user because Firefox tries (and fails) to guess whether the user feels like coming back to what they were doing or like just visiting the same page again, probably not from the very beginning, but not trying to continue the previous operations. This mismatch sometimes is really confusing, and that's why I'm asking for Firefox to (at least have an option to) use some behavior that's both local (not in the very end of the tab bar) and completely predictable (no hidden state I need to guess like "wait, did I switch tabs or not before the last break").
So basically the current behavior looks to me like a tightrope. There's a nice straight path which has tabs open after the current, left-to-right... but if you want it to work consistently, you must not switch tabs as long as you're not finished. Either that, or you need to come back, find the latest opened tab and move the "parent" tab after it manually to continue the sequence. If there's a simple but urgent question in a chat in another tab... well, sorry, you're out of luck.
By the way, an especially annoying moment is that this sequence is forced on me. I cannot just drag one tab if I want to reorder it to a different place because that automatically switches me to that tab and breaks the sequence.
Now I don't see the issue from the OP:
"stay on the same tab and open a few tabs then wait and open a few more for example If you open 3 one after an other but after a bit open 3 more with will look something like this
C 4 5 6 1 2 3"
Does this actually happen? Because it's definitely a bad idea to have some hidden timer for this in my opinion.
This one I could not reproduce. I'd guess that "after a bit" here is a representation of "after I did something else for a bit" and shows that, at least for some users, the "context switch" heuristic is non-obvious and they don't expect switching to something else and back to affect the tab order.
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