1968732 - browser.urlbar.secondaryActions.switchToTab looks to be a bit broken

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[k4sum1]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:139.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/139.0

Steps to reproduce:

Go to about:config
Type browser.urlbar.secondaryActions.switchToTab
Make a new boolean
Set it to true

Actual results:

When I type the name of an open tab and see the option for it, I still see the switch to tab text. Although it looks a bit different than usual and is on a new line instead of next to the tab item.

Clicking the item does not switch the tab as expected after setting the preference.

Without this set if I hold Shift/Ctrl/Alt, the switch to tab text will go away and it will just go to the url in the new tab. If I set this preference, I get the exact same behavior. The text goes away and I go to the tab in the new tab.

Expected results:

From my understanding reading comments, this should reverse the behavior of switch to tab. Instead of holding Shift/Ctrl/Alt to not switch to the old tab, the user would instead need to hold Shift/Ctrl/Alt to switch to the old tab.

So this should mean that with the preference set, opening the tab, typing the name of an open tab, the url should appear as if it's not open or at least not have a buggy new line, clicking it should go to the url in the current tab (this part works), and holding Shift/Ctrl/Alt should instead switch to the already open tab.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Address Bar' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! Thank you for submitting this issue I have tried to reproduce the issue on my end but unfortunately I wasn't able to with firefox 141.0a1(2025-05-27) on Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 10.
Could you please answer the following questions in order to further investigate this issue?

1. Does this issue happen with a new profile? Here is a link on how to create one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
2. Does this issue happen in the latest nightly? Here is a link from where you can download it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
3. Do you have any addons installed? If yes could you please list them?
4. Could you please provide a screenshot or a screen recording with the issue?

Comment 3

[k4sum1]

Ok I think I understand where you're coming from. I didn't expect the weird Switch to Tab thing be a button. Re-reading the comment, "default behaviour is to navigate and button is provided to switch to tab." I had originally thought button had meant like Ctrl, Shift, or Alt were intended to reverse the behavior, not that it's an actual button to switch to the tab.

I guess this is working as intended here, but the styling feels off. Is this button supposed to be on a separate line? I feel like either it's supposed to be on the same line or it's supposed to also show the URL here.

https://files.catbox.moe/7n6jt2.png

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Dale, we think browser.urlbar.secondaryActions.switchToTab is an old experimental option for an alternative switch to tab layout. Is that correct? If so, should we be removing support for the preference now.

Whilst we realise this won't support the reporter's use case, we do not think we want to support that case, since it is difficult to indicate that you'd be able to switch to tab by pressing shift (or other modifier).

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

That option is not officially supported yet, we could remove the pref or keep it for future dev.
I still think replacing key modifier with a visible option would be a good idea. We'd likely not keep both key modifiers and the button.

Comment 6

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Clearing needinfo, its on the backlog