233931 - Ctrl+tab should switch through recent tabs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 178556

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Tim Powell]

Found in Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release.

After opening multiple tabs in a window, I want to switch back and forth between
a few. Ctrl+tab seems to cycle through the tabs in order from left to right in
the window. It would better match my expectations -- perhaps erroneously based
on treating tabs as a window replacement -- and usage needs to cycle through
them in order of last focus. This would be more consistent with the Alt+tab
behavior with windows. I frequently switch back and forth between two web pages
to compare them.

To reproduce:
Open multiple tabs in a window.
Pick a tab (tab1), then pick another tab (tab2), preferably such that tab2 is
not right next to tab1.
Press Ctrl+tab.

Actual:
It switched to whatever tab is to the right of tab2.

Expected:
It switches to tab1.

Ideally this would cycle through all the tabs in order of most recent focus.
Depending on the speed of switching tabs, I'd almost rather see this highlight
the tabs at the top of the window in historical order of focus as I continue to
press Ctrl+tab and only actually switch to the page when I've released the keys
(just like alt+tab for windows). This may also be less distracting when picking
the tab to switch to since the pages aren't flashing by. 

I don't think treating the browser window as a tabbed dialog makes sense. I can
see the logic of having ctrl+tab move forward to the next tab on the right in
tabbed dialogs (it's a windows UI standard and dialogs should be for infrequent
use). I don't believe this makes sense in the typical usage of multiple web
pages opened in a single window. Most recently viewed is a well understood user
concept and is the heart of the back button.

Comment 1

[Tim Powell]

Hmmm... this is related to bug 144207. It looks like a duplicate of bug 178556.
Drat: Won't fix.

It seems to me that the real concern here is what to do with the very powerful
feature of opening tabs in the background. In the general case of not opening
tabs in the background, using ctrl+tab to cycle through tab focus history
matches user expectations. But opening tabs in the background complicates
things: one usage model with opening tabs in the background is to open a bunch
of tabs from a single page and then jump through all of the not-yet-viewed ones.
Perhaps having ctrl+tab prefer cycling through all the tabs not yet viewed and
then going through the viewed history would work. This is sounding a lot more
complicated and may be hard for users to comprehend what's going on.

I think I'd still like to be able to jump back and forth between the current and
most recently viewed tabs. Bug 115215 appears to cover that.

Comment 2

[Tim Powell]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 178556 ***