1980186 - New tab is incorrectly added inside a tab group when it should appear outside.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[jimblye]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Set Firefox to open new tabs immediately to the right of the current tab.

Have a tab group located immediately to the right of the current tab.

Open a new tab.

Actual results:

If the tab immediately to the right is a group, the new tab is created inside the group.
If the group is collapsed, the new tab appears to be "missing" until the group is expanded.
When expanded, the new tab is found as the leftmost tab inside the group.

Expected results:

The new tab should appear immediately to the right of the current tab, outside of any groups.

Comment 1

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hello, thank you for the bug report!
Unfortunately I couldn’t reproduce your issue. Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions so we can investigate this further?

• Could you please detail the STR or attach a screen recording of the issue?
• 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
• Does this issue happen with latest nightly? Here is a link from where you can download it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
• Does this issue happen when Firefox is in Troubleshoot Mode? Here’s a link on how to enable it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode#w_how-to-start-firefox-in-troubleshoot-mode

Thank you.

Comment 2

[jimblye]

To clarify: the behavior I was seeing occurred when using Cmd+T to open a new tab.

I created a new profile and confirmed that pressing Cmd+T opens the new tab at the far right — which is the default behavior. However, opening a link with Cmd+Click correctly opens the new tab immediately to the right of the current tab, even if the next tab is a tab group. So that behavior appears to be working as intended.

What I hadn’t realized is that I had an extension installed in my original profile — "Open Tabs Next to Current" — which modifies the behavior of Cmd+T to open the new tab next to the current one. I had forgotten the extension was responsible for this, so it turns out the issue I saw was caused by that extension, not Firefox itself.

Sorry for the confusion!

Side note: It would be nice if Firefox had a built-in option to open new tabs (like those opened via Cmd+T) next to the current tab without needing an extension.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to jimblye from comment #2)

Side note: It would be nice if Firefox had a built-in option to open new tabs (like those opened via Cmd+T) next to the current tab without needing an extension.

You can set browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent = false in about:config to modify the Cmd+T behavior.

Closing this as it seems like an add-on bug that would need to be fixed on the add-on side, as we already provide the necessary tab APIs.

Comment 4

[Stephen Thompson [:sthompson]]

There are also some mouse shortcuts for opening a new tab next to the current tab https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mouse-shortcuts-perform-common-tasks#w_tabs specifically, middle-clicking the "new tab" button in the tab strip. Agreed that it would be nice to have this available on the keyboard, too.