2025603 - Vertical tabs sidebar scrolls to show new background tab, active tab no longer displayed in sidebar.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Sidebar, defect, P2)

Description

[anon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:150.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/150.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Fill the vertical tabs sidebar with enough tabs to make the scrollbar appear.
2. Select the topmost tab in the sidebar.
3. Middle-click or shift-middle-click a bookmark to open it in the background on the bottom of the sidebar.

Actual results:

The sidebar autoscrolls to the show the new background tab. The previously focused tab is no longer viewable.

Expected results:

Usually, a new background tab will be created at the end of the tab bar, to the right of the current tab, or as a child tab somewhere to the right of its parent tab. In these cases, the active tab remains viewable in the horizontal tab bar, though it may be pushed to the far left. The vertical tabs sidebar should behave much the same in these cases to maintain consistency.

It looks like bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921951 may have introduced this behavior. It seems people have differing opinions on what should happen when a new background tab is created. Note, the two most popular vertical tabs extensions 'Tree Style Tabs' and 'Sidebery' have differing behavior when creating background tabs. 'Tree Style Tabs' sidebar behaves like Firefox's horizontal tab bar when creating background tabs. 'Sidebery' behaves much like the current implementation of the vertical tabs sidebar when creating background tabs.

Attached is a video showing the different behavior between the vertical tabs sidebar and the horizontal tab bar when creating new background tabs.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[anon]

Attachment: firefox vertical tabs.mkv

Comment 3

[anon]

Attachment: edge vertical tabs.mkv

Here is a video of Microsoft Edge handling the creation of background tabs in its vertical tabs sidebar.

Comment 4

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:kcochrane, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 5

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:kcochrane, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[Stephen Thompson [:sthompson]]

I guess the horizontal tabs approach (doing a color highlight pulse on the scrollbox arrow) won't work for the current vertical tabs UI because we don't display the scrollbox arrows. Perhaps UX has some ideas.

Comment 7

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:kcochrane, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.