1571242 - It's easy to accidentally detach a tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 727420

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[manuelchaves]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Use your mouse around until you accidentally detach a tab into its own window.

Actual results:

The tab became a window, and now I have to put it back in its original window.

Expected results:

The tab doesn't detach unless I want.
Maybe it's just me, or a rare case. But it's annoying when it happens.
Would be nice to have an option to not allow detachment by dragging on maximized windows, while allowing on unmaximized windows.
I guess moving tabs around while maximized is still a usual scenario, especially on multiple monitors.
So not sure how to tackle it.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

You perform an action, so something happens.

What do you expect to happen? A dialog to warn you?

Comment 2

[manuelchaves]

Yes, it's a valid action. I guess I expect an implementation that is not prone to that action happening accidentally. Or just a way to disable it when maximized. Or a way to easily revert the tab back to the original window.

Comment 3

[Florens Verschelde :fvsch]

Definitely agree with the sentiment in this bug report.
I think I accidentally detach tabs a few times a week.
I also accidentally reorder tabs sometimes, but IMO it's less of a problem because it does not cause such a big context change.

Testing the current implementation, it seems that click-and-drag from a tab will detach this tab into a new window if:

• the click starts on the tab
• it ends anywhere outside of the tab strip

There seems to be not timing threshold, e.g. if this click-and-drag action is done in roughly 200ms it will detach the tab, though such a short click is more likely to be a kind of misclick and not a legitimate intent to detach the tab.

Some scenarios where this may happen:

1. Misclick: user intended to click something else in Firefox or in other windows (or on the top toolbar on macOS/Linux), ended up clicking a tab in the Firefox tab strip and maintained the click for a short while (100ms-1000ms). Think of it as slipping or tripping and taking half a second to regain balance.

2. Imprecise drag-to-reorder: user intended to move a tab left or right in its current window, and while maintaining the click they moved the pointer left or right (correct) but also maybe 30-50px to the top or bottom. When releasing the click, this movement gets understand as "detach tab into new window", surprising the user.

#1 can maybe be improved by adding a minimum dragging time, although there's a risk that if it's very short it won't catch misclicks, and if we make it longer it will prevent legitimate drag-to-detach interactions.

#2 can be improved by providing visual feedback that shows users when the ongoing drag action will move a tab in the current window, and when it will detach that tab. Currently there is no visual difference between both actions (at least on iOS): Firefox shows a small translucent image of the tab's content when dragging, following the pointer.
Maybe this image should have a different design depending on the action that would be performed? Keeping the current design for drag-to-reorder, and for the detach action maybe one of these:

• bigger image
• make it more opaque
• add a border (suggesting a window border)
• add an icon to the top left border suggesting "new window"
• add a text label on top of the image ("Move to a new window", or "Move to this window" when releasing the click would drop the tab in a different existing window)

And finally #1 and #2 might be improved by making the vertical distance threshold higher, but at the risk of preventing legitimate interactions.

Comment 4

[manuelchaves]

Even an option to need Shift pressed to detach tabs with the mouse would be great. I keep detaching tabs by accident almost daily.

Comment 5

[manuelchaves]

This keeps happening haha. Please can you just make it an option to disable dragging a tab out of the browser? Or, only make the drag work if Shift is pressed? I pretty much never have to move tabs around, I have a single window. But the accidental detachment of tabs happens almost daily, and when I try to reproduce it I can't even tell what I did wrong, because doing it requires a big-ish drag, and I'm not sure I'm doing that much by accident.

Comment 6

[Gingerbread Man]

Bug 727420 covers this.
Bug 616130 is about a way to disable the feature.
Bug 674925 & bug 485105 have dependencies about improving the UI for detaching tabs.

(In reply to manuelchaves from comment #2)

Or a way to easily revert the tab back to the original window.

Install the following extension. It will snap the detached tab back to its original window.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/disable-tab-detach-2/

Also, it's possible to rearrange tabs without using the mouse:

• Ctrl+Shift+Page Up to move the tab to the left.
• Ctrl+Shift+Page Down to move the tab to the right.
• Focus the address bar (e.g. Ctrl+L, Alt+D or F6), Shift+Tab repeatedly until the tab is focused (it gains a dotted rectangular border), then Ctrl+Shift+Home to move the tab to the beginning.
• Same as above, but Ctrl+Shift+End to move the tab to the end.

Comment 8

[Alain Knaff]

Problem still occurs in Firefox 71.0, which is the version currently shipping in Ubuntu.
Problem also occurs with the lightning calendar tabs in Thunderbird (version 68.2.2).

Comment 9

[Andre Klapper]

Alain: This task is already closed, see above