1822201 - Expand tabbrowser documentation to include information on gBrowser

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Infrastructure :: Firefox Source Docs: Content, enhancement)

Description

[Hanna Jones [:hjones]]

The current tabbrowser documentation is pretty terse, and makes no mention of the relationship between tabbrowser and gBrowser. It would be valuable to expand on this, especially considering gBrowser is referenced all over the place in Firefox front-end code. Given how frequently people probably come across or use gBrowser, it seems like it would be helpful/valuable to surface more meaningful search results when someone searches for gBrowser from within Firefox Source Docs.

Some ideas for information we could include:

• The fact that gBrowser is a window-global instance of tabbrowser
• gBrowser is primarily concerned with all things tab related - switching tabs, adding and removing tabs, etc.
  • Bonus points if we are able to document gBrowser's responsibilities more comprehensively, but that seems daunting based on the code (all 6000+ lines of it). Even a pretty high level explanation would be useful
• Some tabbrowser, gBrowser, and xul:browser disambiguation - touch on how these are all related
• What's up with the name gBrowser? Where did that come from? What's in a name?

This is all covered by :mconley in this episode of The Joy of Coding. To start it would be enough just to get the information discussed there into source docs.

URL = https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/base/tabbrowser/index.html

Comment 1

[Ganna]

Hi Hanna, I am the Outreachy applicant and would like to work on this task. I've found the file with tabbrowser documentation in the source code and hope to find all needed information in the video that you have mentioned. I also have a question: should the new page for gBrowser be created with a link to it on tabbrowser page?

Comment 2

[Hanna Jones [:hjones]]

Hey Ganna - thanks for being willing to try writing this up! For now let's put this info in the same file as the existing tabbrowser documentation. We can decide when going through the review process if it makes more sense to separate out the information that is more related to gBrowser.

Comment 3

[Ganna]

Attachment: Bug 1822201 - Expand tabbrowser documentation to include information on gBrowser. r=hjones

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/4f546225ecef
Expand tabbrowser documentation to include information on gBrowser. r=hjones,mconley

Comment 5

[Marian-Vasile Laza]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4f546225ecef