1691896 - Access to recently closed tabs and windows is more difficult after recent menu change

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Menus, defect, P2)

Description

[Kestrel]

Attachment: Recently closed tabs/windows bumped to bottom of screen

After Bug 1689372 the user has to navigate to the bottom of the screen to access the Recently Closed Tabs menu and then back to the top to access the most recent entry. Recent history is given a higher position in the menu despite its large size and relatively low information density. Some users already struggle with discovering recently closed windows and this change makes it harder to find.

Consideration was given to make access to recently closed tabs easier in the past (Bug 597593, Bug 1466732, Bug 1569793).

Comment 1

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: This is the critical accessibility issue.

Comment 3

[Meridel [:meridel]]

Attachment: New History Submenu with Recently closed on top.png

I think the concern is valid and so I re-worked the IA. It works, and is still much better than what we had. Romain, let us know if you approve making changes at this point.

Comment 4

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

(In reply to Meridel from comment #3)

Created attachment 9202633 [details]
New History Submenu with Recently closed on top.png

I think the concern is valid and so I re-worked the IA. It works, and is still much better than what we had. Romain, let us know if you approve making changes at this point.

Unfortunately we don't seem to have exhaustive data here to understand which are of the menu drive most usage but 4% to 5% inside the History menu open "Recently closed tabs" currently. It's hard to make a call based on data given people will look into History entries without selecting any and decide to go somewhere because they could not find what them wanted from this section.
The concern raised here makes sense and Meride'l proposal seems to address it so agreed let's make this change.

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Changing the priority to p2 as the bug is tracked by a release manager for the current nightly.
See What Do You Triage for more information

Comment 6

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Attachment: Bug 1691896 - Put Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows at the top of the History panel body. r?emalysz!

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/cf9e26b44245
Put Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows at the top of the History panel body. r=emalysz

Comment 8

[Cristian Brindusan [:cbrindusan]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/cf9e26b44245

Comment 9

[Alin Ilea, Desktop QA]

Verified - Fixed in latest Nightly 88.0a1 (build id: 20210315214853) and Beta 87.0b8 both with proton pref on and off, using Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04 and MacOS 10.15. The Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows options are at the top of the History submenu.