296970 - Drag-and-drop of background tab changes focus

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Oakwine]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050607 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050607 Firefox/1.0+

Using the now-built-in drag-and-drop capabilities in Firefox (see <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179656">Bug 179656 - Allow
drag-and-drop reordering of tabs</a>).  When I try to change the tab position of
a tab that is in the background, the tab is focused on mousedown (see <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295721">Bug 295721 - focused
tabs in tabbox behaviour tweaks</a>).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open www.google.com in the first tab
2. Open www.yahoo.com in a second tab
3. Focus the second tab (Yahoo).
4. Drag the first tab (Google) to a new position so that it follows the second
tab (Yahoo).

Actual Results:  
The Google tab has focus.

Expected Results:  
The Yahoo tab has focus.

I understand from the comments 5 and 6 in Bug 295721 that the mousedown focus
was the intended behavior.  However, I believe that they did not consider the
effect that this change would have on Bug 179656, and therefore I have filed
this bug to request a change.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I never get tired of the assumption that because a result doesn't match
someone's expectations, it couldn't have possibly been considered.

Yeah, this changes behaviour compared to miniT on 1.0, but this bit of function
wasn't enough to deviate from how native tab widgets work on all of our major
platforms.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I second this request.. :)
I rather keep the focus on the page that I'm reading.

Comment 3

[Jed B]

I third it.
I also think the assumption made is correct.

If a user wanted focus, he would click on the tab.
It's counter intuitive to change focus to something a user is draging and dropping.

The same goes for dragging and droping the tab that currently has focus, the
focus stayes.

I'm not saying your wrong Mike, but this should be considered a bit more, and
perhaps we could conduct a usibility study to find out what indeed does work out
best for the user.

Comment 4

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Would be marvellous if the choice focus or not was an extra option in about:config 

Comment 5

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** Bug 299921 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

*** Bug 300701 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Mathieu Pellerin]

why would you want to focus your page while being in a re-ordering process?

mike could you define 'how native tab widgets work on all of our major
platforms'?

Comment 8

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

*** Bug 302435 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Richard Gibson]

Another vote for the change (or at least for an option in about:config). 
Drag-and-drop changes the way people utilize tabs, and stealing focus on
mousedown breaks the new interaction.  Not only that, but the Unread Tabs
extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=631) is
severely crippled; one loses the ability to rearrange unread tabs because moving
a tab marks it as "read".  AFAICT, this problem (reordering unread/background
tabs) is impossible to fix as long as tabs focus on mousedown.

P.S. Is Bug 296980 a duplicate of this one?

Comment 10

[Hemiola SUN]

another vote here, but seems too late... already marked as WONTFIX...

Comment 11

[Onno Witvliet]

*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***

Comment 12

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 319041 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Grick]

Is this not going to be changed?

I also expect the dragged tab not to steal focus.

Comment 14

[Fox2]

Another vote for this; as people above said.

Comment 15

[bomfog]

The FLST extension <http://gorgias.de/mfe/> fixes/works around this for me on recent trunk. An undocumented, inadvertent feature, I think.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9b5pre) Gecko/2008032608 Minefield/3.0b5pre - Build ID: 2008032608

Comment 16

[Brian Shacklett]

I have also had success with the FLST addon running 3.0b4. Thank you, Michael.

Comment 17

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

Tabberwocky <https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/14439> also works around this with a visible preference and feature by suppressing the mousedown event listener and instead calling the same function on click.