Closed Bug 168564 Opened 22 years ago Closed 22 years ago

Closing Tab should select next tab instead of previous one

Categories

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, enhancement)

Product:
Camino Graveyard
Component:
Tabbed Browsing
Platform:
PowerPC
macOS
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED
Milestone:
Camino1.5

People

(Reporter: me, Assigned: mikepinkerton)

References

Details

Closing a Tab currently goes to the previous tab after it is closed. It should instead go to the next tab. This is from a usability perspective. Perhaps there could be an option to decide this in Tabbed Preferences.
This was reported by many for previous Mozilla releases too. It was addressed and resolved for Mozilla 1.1 (See the "What's new section"): http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.1/ (I don't find the bug-id, maybe 'cause its closed now)
Cortland, what build ID are you reporting this bug against? (The bug referred to in comment 1 may be bug 123563.) It's far too esoteric a thing to add a pref for.
our usability testing couldn't adequately answer whether prev or next tab should be selected. i think we need to do more testing.
Target Milestone: --- → Chimera1.1
*** Bug 175576 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just downloaded Chimera 0.6, and this behavior is one of the first things that I noticed. Most annoying is that the behavior is different from Mozilla 1.1. With regard to usability testing, it may be helpful to understand how people use tabs. My own use case is to go to the front page of a news site, e.g. nytimes or slashdot, and start opening links in new tabs as I scan down this frequently updated front page. I then start reading the stories that I have opened. New links are opened in tabs on the right, and I often like to read the stories in the same order that I opened them in. So I am progressing through these tabs from left to right.
pink: This got implemented in Mozilla 1.1 due to high user demand. I'd consider having Chimera act differently a bad idea.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Just to give you yet another opinion on this... I personally would like tabs to remember which other tab it was opened from, at least as long as I haven't loaded another page in the opened tab. Confusing? Here's an example. I have a "daily Mac news" bookmark which opens four tabs: | Mac OS X Hints | VersionTracker | MacFixIt | Think Secret | MOSXHints will be the one that is shown first. So, I'm there reading the latest hints and see an interesting one that I want to read more about. I ctrl-click a link and Chimera opens a new tab to the right side of Think Secret tab. I have set up tabs to open in the background, so I still see MOSXHints front page. So, I go and click the tab I just opened and see that blah, this story is boring and press cmd-W to close the tab. Because currently Chimera opens the previous tab, it now shows me Think Secret. In this situation I would rather see Chimera to go back to the MOSXHints tab where I just came from. This feature should probably be made so that if I load a new page either to the original tab or to the spawned tab, Chimera will then forget which tab was the parent and which was its offspring.
My browsing style is similar to Daniel Dulay's - open a number of tabs in the background from one main page, read from the first tab and then close it, read the second tab and close, etc. If one thinks of browsing as constructing a tree and closing tabs as marking a node as 'visited', then it would be nice to perform a depth-first traversal of the tree by just closing tabs (no mouse interaction required).
I also have a similar browsing style to Daniel Dulay and further would like to suggest that a bonus preference might be to open a tab "quietly" eg, that it should open but not become active - you should remain on the page you opened it from. That way when I'm openning a number of tabs from the same page, I don't have to keep clicking back to the first tab.
"Quiet tabbing" is already implemented ("Load ... in background").
Summary: Closing Tab should select next tab in → Closing Tab should select next tab instead of previous one
i also suggest a window history so that when i close a TAB it goes back to the last TAB i was viewing. my reason is this, i regularly visit many forums, at the forum index i can click up to 20 threads to open in new tabs. within a thread may be a link to another site, which i open in a new tab which loads in the background. i read the rest of the thread and then switch to the tab for the site that was linked. after reviewing this site i want to close it (the TAB) and return to the thread that linked to it so i can post my comments if any. With such a large amount of threads open i may not be able to see easily which TAB is the thread i want, so i will have to go searching for it. i then want to close this tab and move to the next thread. this will be the next TAB to the right, i will have closed the forum index TAB so there will be no previous TABS i nthe history, so i think a default of next TAB to the right when no history is the correct behaviour.
*** Bug 184818 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
i don't use tabs, so mind you, i'm not the best person to comment, but it seems to me that when I close a tab, i expect to see what's "under" it, which to me is the tab to the left (the "previous" tab). why do people expect what is on the right (the "next" tab)? maybe it's my western left-to-right bias, the past is to the left. as for a tab history: no, no, no, no, and no. there would be no visual way for a user to understand why tabs close in the order they do and it would simply appear as magical to them. magic is bad.
Mike, I think the reason is people seem to like the focus to stay where it is and the tabs kind of shift into the focus. I don't really know why people like that, but I admit I like that way better too. One situation where I like the proposed way better is when you kind of 'stem' tabs off a page. You are reading one page and you open some links in new tabs. Then you go and read the first tab you opened. When you are done with that you close it. You want to go straight to the next one, but instead it takes you to the original page. That might be a reason.
I agree with comment #11. To me that is not magic at all; it is what I logically expect. Think about the paradigm that tabs represent: If I have a number of tabs open and I am reading one, then click on another, I am in effect taking that second tabbed file folder from the stack of tabbed file folders and moving it to the top so I can read it. If I then decide to remove that tabbed file folder from the stack and throw it away, I expect to see the one that was on top before: that is, the one I was reading previously. Thus, I normally expect to see my previous tab when I close another, and am confused when this does not happen. If all my previous tabs are closed already, then I expect to see the one that is on the top of the stack. If I am using tabs opened in the background, then this would be the left-most tab (since as I open them I am putting them behind the current stack of tabbed file folders). If I am using tabs opened in the foreground, then this would be the right-most tab (since as I open them I am putting them on top of the current stack of tabbed file folders). Completely logical and intuitive.
comment #6 says it all. Please get this in soon before I go completely bonkers.
I agree with what Mike says in comment #13, but I come to a different conclusion. I use the "open new tabs in the background" feature, which opens tabs behind all other tabs - and right of them. I.e. the tabs right of the activated one are *behind* it. I also agree with the "left-to-rigth-bias" thing, but for me this is a good reason to make the software work to match the bias: I read tabs from left to right, which means that the ones I have not read yet are to the right, and therefore should be activated if a tab is closed. Tabs to the left are those I might have left open for further use, but not those which are interesting in the moment.
fixed.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 22 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
vrfy'd fixed with 2003.03.14.12.
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
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