464045 - Show a fixed order list in addition to MRU list for tab previews

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

One particular use case of the "list all tabs" button seems to be to access a 'well known' tab. Perhaps tab #1 has mail and tab #2 has rss, etc. The old behavior required just clicking the list and selecting the first entry. With only a MRU list, people now need to search for that tab.

Instead of only showing a MRU list, we can show another ordering of tabs that behaves like the old list. A few ways to make the list:
1) tab order (tab 1 first, tab 2 next)
2) oldest tab first (first tab keeps its spot even if reordered)
3) adaptively track tabs picked from the list

One potential way to show two lists is to keep the same layout with some visuals to separate them. Keyboard presses can explicitly move between the lists.

/------------\
|  |search|  |
|_F1__F2__F3_| <-- fixed list
| M1  M2  M3 | <-- default ctrl-tab focus
| M4  M5  M6 | <-- MRU list
\------------/

Pressing ctrl-tab will focus M2, and multiple presses to tab after M6 will load the next page of tabs. If the user explicitly presses up from the M list into F, tabbing from F3 will load the next page. Searching would just show a single list of matching tabs.

Perhaps when tabbing off the last F3 or M6, the next page can be filled with just the fixed list or just the MRU list. Or maybe show 2 rows of the "current list" to allow switching into the other list.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: two rows MRU, rest in tab bar order (starting at 0 instead of relative to the current tab)

We already do 1), sort of, but the tabs that we show in tab bar order start next to the current tab -- not sure if that's useful. This patch drops the "next to the current tab" bit and sets the MRU limit from 7 to 6.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: two rows MRU, rest in tab bar order (starting at 0 instead of relative to the current tab)

previous patch broke Shift+Ctrl+Tab

Comment 3

[Peter Lairo]

Perhaps add a button to the tab panel to toggle between fixed order and MRU; and to remember the previous state for the next time.

BTW: My absolute preference would be to eliminate the tab panel completely - at least for the CTRL+Tab keypress case. (reason in bug 465076 comment 78)

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

There's only one row in the Ctrl+Tab panel now, and the All Tabs panel isn't MRU-ordered. -> wontfix