331852 - 'Confirm close' dialog should offer third button/option 'Close active tab only' RFE

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Bernd Bacmeister]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

When I close the FF window, having multiple tabs open, the 'Confirm close' dialog offers the two buttons/options 1. 'Close tabs' and 2. 'Cancel' 

(message says: "You are about to close x open tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?"  'Warn me when I attempt to close multiple tabs' is enabled)

RFE: A third button/option 'Close active tab only' (or similar) would enhance usability
- I am accustomed to close windows by clicking the windows close button; therfore I use this function sometimes erroneously instead of the close tab button (given that my intend is to close the active tab only instead of the whole FF window). The requested feature will allow to recover from this user error more effective  (only one click on the new suggested button instead of two clicks - 'cancel' and 'close tab')


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open multiple tabs
2.Close FF window
3.

Actual Results:  
'Confirm close'dialog offers the two buttons/options 1. 'Close tabs' and 2. 'Cancel' 

Expected Results:  
Suggested result:
'Confirm close' dialog offers three buttons/options 1. 'Close tabs' 2. 'Close active tab only' and 3. 'Cancel' 

This is a DWIM instead of a DWIS feature - 'Do What I Mean' instead of 'Do What I Say'  ;-)   It will alleviate user errors

Comment 1

[Michael Ventnor]

Attachment: Screenshot of patch in action

Like this? I don't know how Fx veterans will react to this, however I know it will VASTLY improve the experience of new users who don't have a clue what tabbed browsing is. And for people who still click the X in habit. :)

Comment 2

[Michael Ventnor]

Attachment: Proposed patch

Patch for the dialog. Tested on today's nightly and works beautifully.

Comment 3

[Michael Ventnor]

Attachment: Proposed patch 1.0.1

This one has a tiny edit in it.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Adding a third button just makes the dialog harder to read - "Yes/No" is easier to parse than "Yes/No/Something Else", and the use case seems rare enough that selecting "No" and using the tab close button/Ctrl+W/etc isn't such a big burden.

I think this should be WONTFIX.

Comment 5

[Johannes Buchner]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Adding a third button just makes the dialog harder to read - "Yes/No" is easier
> to parse than "Yes/No/Something Else", and the use case seems rare enough that
> selecting "No" and using the tab close button/Ctrl+W/etc isn't such a big
> burden.
> 
> I think this should be WONTFIX.
Ack. Also, by not providing this feature, people get trained to not make the same mistake again and common to MDI. 

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

comment 4 and comment 5 together have it.  Complicating the dialog to offer a soft landing for the wrong action, instead of getting the user to change their behaviour to the more efficient case, is actually detrimental.  I could even see a case where unknowing users will adopt that as their means of closing the current tab, if they weren't discovering the closebutton on the tab (which sounds nutty, but if action X works to achieve task Y, many people will learn that and not attempt to find a better path.