1963684 - Allow users to disable tab group creation via drag-drop

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Stephen Thompson [:sthompson]]

Some users may find that dragging and dropping tabs results too often in accidentally creating a tab group. There are existing prefs to make this less likely:

• increase browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS so that the user must keep their mouse still for longer before triggering group creation
• increase browser.tabs.dragDrop.moveOverThresholdPercent so that the amount of overlap required to trigger group creation will shrink (but has the side effect of making tabs move over less frequently as you're dragging)

We should introduce a new pref that enables the functionality to create a tab group using drag-drop. The pref should default to true so that there is no change in default behavior. If a user disables this pref, then there will be no UI feedback for drag-drop group creation and it will not be possible to create a tab group using drag-drop.

Comment 1

[Ziyuan]

(In reply to Stephen Thompson [:sthompson] from comment #0)

Some users may find that dragging and dropping tabs results too often in accidentally creating a tab group. There are existing prefs to make this less likely:

• increase browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS so that the user must keep their mouse still for longer before triggering group creation
• increase browser.tabs.dragDrop.moveOverThresholdPercent so that the amount of overlap required to trigger group creation will shrink (but has the side effect of making tabs move over less frequently as you're dragging)

We should introduce a new pref that enables the functionality to create a tab group using drag-drop. The pref should default to true so that there is no change in default behavior. If a user disables this pref, then there will be no UI feedback for drag-drop group creation and it will not be possible to create a tab group using drag-drop.

I also notice there is a browser.tabs.dragDrop.pinInteractionCue.delayMS. Is it the delay of the blue outline around the tab header when the grouping happens? If so I am surprised to see browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS is not the same as browser.tabs.dragDrop.pinInteractionCue.delayMS by default.

Comment 2

[Stephen Thompson [:sthompson]]

The pinInteractionCue delay was introduced in bug 1989344 in Firefox 143 to control when the pinned-tab drop indicator appears (if you have no pinned tabs and you drag a tab near the beginning of the tab strip). The createGroup delay was set to its current value in bug 1942332 for Firefox 137, and it controls how long you need to hold an ungrouped dragged tab on top of another ungrouped tab in order to engage the drop-to-create state, which does highlight the tabs with a group color.

Even though these are separate delays for separate purposes, we have increased both of these delays in the past due to feedback that the delays were too short. I think it might be a great idea to increase the createGroup delay (currently 240) to the current value for pinInteractionCue (500). I can file a separate bug for that. Thank you for the suggestion!