1734652 - Contextually suggest user to reopen accidentally closed window

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]]

Here's a scenario I have seen my wife encounter multiple times:

1. She has one main window open, and a couple less important windows with a handful of tabs each
2. She hits some hotkey sequence that closes the main window
3. She looks through the remaining windows, which have some tabs but not the main set she cares about. She freaks out because "Firefox lost my tabs!"
4. (if lucky) I or one of our kids is around, and we remind her of the "Reopen Recently Closed Windows" function

One problem here is that there's really no way to guess that what happened is that a window was closed. The user did not do it intentionally; from their perspective, it's gone for unknown reasons. So even if they frantically scan through all the menu options, they probably won't even recognize that "Recently Closed Windows" is relevant.

A straightforward suggestion would be to pop up a doorhanger on the active window for some time that would allow the user to "undo" or reopen the closed window. It might need to be conditioned on something to not be annoying when intentionally closing windows.

Comment 1

[Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]]

Looking into this further, I can't figure out how this could be happening.

• there is no hotkey sequence other than Alt-F4 that would accidentally close a window, and while it's possible she occasionally hits that (because her laptop's Fn keys use a "Fn" modifier key, so Fn-F4 could easily accidentally become Alt-F4), I don't think it's likely
• any window closing mechanism would prompt if multiple tabs are being closed (she does have this configured to be on), so the "main" window should not be silently closing
• she claims that when she wants to exit the browser, she does a proper close rather than closing the windows

That last one was because I was hypothesizing a scenario:

1. Open up a secondary window, let's say it has a single tab
2. At a later point, decide to close the browser by clicking the 'X' on the main window tab
3. That window closes, revealing the secondary window. Either 'X' that one or do a regular shutdown.
4. Restart the browser, restoring only that last closed window.

Essentially, the error is to try to shut down the browser by closing all of its windows, which normally works because normally you have one window. But this scenario can't happen because at step 2, it would prompt about closing multiple tabs.

I guess we'll have to wait for the next time it happens, and try to figure it out then.

Comment 2

[Steve Fink [:sfink] [:s:]]

(Closing until I figure out something actionable.)