Open Bug 1938297 Opened 2 months ago

Disorientation when opening new tabs while in an active group + sidebar tabs

Categories

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

enhancement

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: dietrich, Unassigned)

Details

I've been daily-driving the tab groups feature with the vertical tabs sidebar feature also enabled.

Sidebar tabs require a much higher reliance on keyboard navigation of open tabs, as there's less visual tab information to orient yourself with.

A pain point that has arisen frequently is that after opening a new tab, the tabs to the right and left are not what I expected.

Suddenly I'm in an unfamiliar place on the tab strip, and have to figure out where I am while midway through a task, which breaks concentration.

I realized that what's happening is that I often Cmd/Ctrl+T to check something relevant to the current task, and then switch back and forth a few times between the original tab and new tab using keyboard shortcuts.

When not in a group, this works as expected. When in a group, it's quite confusing.

Example: I'm reviewing a PR on Github and need to check MDN for some API syntax. I open a new tab, read the MDN page, and the switch back to the previous tab using the keyboard shortcut.

Expected result: I'm back on the Github tab

Actual result: I'm somewhere else, eventually realizing that I'm outside of the group

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