Closed Bug 341648 Opened 18 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Be consistent about opening search results in background tab vs. active tab

Categories

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

2.0 Branch
PowerPC
macOS
defect
Not set
trivial

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: zach, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: polish)

I noticed this inconsistency today when writing testcases for the search service. 

When searching from the search bar, option-enter opens the results in a new active tab, but the context menu "Search Google for" opens the search results in a background tab. Presumably, we should be consistent about which we want. 

To me, it makes the most sense to also make the context menu 'Search for Selection' open an active tab as well, since the user presumably wants to immediately see the results for their query.

If nothing else, can we clarify that this is how the feature is intended to operate?
Severity: normal → trivial
I believe that search bar results used to load in background tabs -- I find the current behaviour to be extremely frustrating, and there appears to be no way to turn it off.

Was this introduced by this change https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707672 ?

I agree with previous suggestions (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469456) that there should be one consistent preference which governs whether *any* new tab is loaded in the background.  I very often look up terms in the search bar and click on links while reading a page -- I don't consider these two actions to be fundamentally different, and I expect to be able to have both of them happen in the background without stealing focus from the page.

If there is firm consensus that these different kinds of new tab events should have separately configurable behaviour, there should at least be a new preference which allows new search bar tabs to be loaded in the background, which currently seems to be impossible.
Apologies -- I just saw how old this bug is.  This is obviously not the right place.
This behavior is now consistent. Contextual search opens a new tab that becomes the active tab. The same is true for search bar results and option-enter.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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