1725754 - Add context menu & tooltip to "recently closed tabs/windows" history subview?

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

The main history entries section in the history panel has context="placesContext" and tooltip="bhTooltip" so you can view overflowing titles and URLs, and interact with the entry, all from within the panel. But the closed tab/window entries in the "recently closed x" submenus don't have either tooltips or context menus. Although these represent objects from the closed tab data query, not actual places nodes, there are some commonalities.

For one, if you set tooltip="bhTooltip" here, it works just fine without any additional modification. And if you go to some website in a new tab, close the tab, find the history entry, right-click it and select "forget about this site," then go back to the recently closed tabs menu, you can confirm that it's been scrubbed from the tab data as well as the history. So it would make sense to be able to right-click a tab data entry in the submenu to "forget about this site" to do the exact same thing, or just "forget about this tab" to forget the tab data but not the history data.

There obviously aren't a lot of possible transactions to be made with the tab data items themselves, but several of the context menus that apply to history entries would be useful here in addition to just clicking to restore the tab as it was. To be able to open it in a new tab, tabshifted, in a new window, in a different container, in a private window, etc. And options to bookmark or copy the item to some other place that accepts places nodes, like the bookmarks toolbar.

I'm not sure the best way to handle that though. Should a fake places node be created for the tab data objects, or should there be some branching logic for regular places nodes vs. tab data objects, or perhaps there should be an entirely separate context menu for recently closed tabs/windows. The latter seems enticing but I don't know how the copy function could be made to work correctly with the paste function. Or maybe everyone just agrees this feature is too obscure for it to matter?

For me it feels more like a defect that you can right-click the buttons in the history menu, but if you go one menu deeper, suddenly you can't click buttons that look literally identical to buttons in the previous menu. At the very least, tooltip should definitely be added, since it requires no extra work, just a tooltip attribute. Tooltip seems like a bigger deal, but ironically it was the lack of context menu that I noticed first. I got that feeling like I was running into a bug and right-clicked it a dozen times before I remembered that they are not history results.

I know this menu isn't the most prominent, but once a user finds it I imagine they will probably use it pretty often. Just hitting shift+ctrl+T a bunch of times instead tends to make a big mess because it always restores tabs back next to their opener/related tab if they have one. So if I wanna do something with a tab I closed an hour ago, I gotta sign up for locating and cleaning up 20 other tabs that I opened in the process that are scattered all over the place.

Comment 1

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

Maybe the ideal situation is that the SessionStore _closedWindows objects could store some kind of reference to the history entries corresponding to the tab(s) within them. Even for the _closedTabs stuff this would mean the possible interactions in the context menu are qualitatively different from a normal history entry.

Like in addition to just forgetting about the site entry at the tab's active index (the one that determines the entry's label, icon, url, etc.) there could also be an option to forget about the entire tab. So every history item corresponding to every navigation entry could be forgotten at once.

Likewise, for _closedWindows this would allow the user to forget every navigation entry for every tab in a given window. If that was the case, then adding the context menu wouldn't just be an additional convenience, since you couldn't do the same thing in the history mainview.

Other functions in the context menu might be identical, like "bookmark" or "copy." But those still wouldn't be redundant, because in some cases it may be easier to find a page you navigated to via a tab you closed than to dig through the entire history list. Since users commonly make multiple navigations per-tab, there's a good chance a page that appears in the recently closed tabs list will not appear in the 42 history entries in the mainview because they visited many more pages in the intervening period than they closed tabs.

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Thank you for the report! Marking this as a new Enhancement.