1811162 - With browser.tabs.loadInBackground=false, consider not breaking the tab ownership chain when opening a new tab or selecting another tab

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Roy Orbitson]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a new window.
2. Type "1" in the address bar to number the tab (delete any autocompleted characters if present), no need to load a page.
3. Create two more tabs in the same manner sequentially numbered "2" and "3".
4. Make tab 1 active (so it becomes the previously focussed tab).
5. Make tab 2 active then close it.

Actual results:

Focus switches to the next tab on the right (tab 3).

This occurs whether pages are loaded in the tabs or not, I just tried to simplify the test case. It of course causes pages to load if they weren't previously (e.g. from a resumed session),

Expected results:

Focus should switch to the last active tab (1). Ideally this would continue as tabs were closed as if Firefox were running down a MRU list of tabs in that window.

I have "Ctrl + Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" enabled, if that's relevant.

Comment 1

[Monica Chiorean]

I was able to reproduce the issue on Win10x64 using FF build 111.0a1(20230119163652)(Open tab1, close tab2 and focus moves to tab3). Same behavior occurs on 74.0a1(20200116214549). Mark as New for confirmation from the developer team.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Roy Orbitson from comment #0)

Expected results:

Focus should switch to the last active tab (1). Ideally this would continue as tabs were closed as if Firefox were running down a MRU list of tabs in that window.

Seems like this would interfere with the use case outlined in bug 748666 comment 5, so I'm closing this as wontfix as well.

Comment 4

[Roy Orbitson]

I'm unable to comment on bug 748666, and I understand the reasons for that case. Though, it's worth considering that it is made practically irrelevant if you tick When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately under Settings > Tabs, i.e. set browser.tabs.loadInBackground to false. When new tabs are loaded in the foreground, the most recently used order will almost always be more relevant than position. Tabs to the right change from ‘probably background tabs’ to ‘may be background tabs if you switched between a couple of recent tabs and broke the chain, but just as likely to be unrelated to your present train of thought, and could have been opened days ago then became greyed out from being idle.’

I have browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent as true, browser.tabs.loadInBackground as false, and browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed as true, which mostly makes tab handling like tree traversal, climbing up and down closely related branches by closing or opening them with middle click. The current close behaviour is like randomly being thrown onto a distant branch, which is distracting. This distant branch then pollutes my MRU, so it's doubly annoying. To avoid this, I have to remember if I switched since opening a tab via middle click, consciously pre-switch to the most recent with Ctrl + Tab, then close the (now) blurred tab, so focus does not move to the wrong tab. This seems antithetical to those prefs.

It would be great if browser.tabs.loadInBackground and/or browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed were also utilised to decide whether to break ownership chains.

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Alright, we can consider that.

Comment 6

[Vincent Lefevre]

See also bug 1970086 (which I reported yesterday since I could not comment on this closed bug). I usually have browser.tabs.loadInBackground set to false (bug 1970086 comment 1 was obtained with that), but note that tabs opened with Ctrl-T are loaded in foreground, so that browser.tabs.loadInBackground is not the only thing to consider. One may also switch to the tab that has just been opened in background (thus doing something similar to tabs opened in foreground).