464578 - All tabs panel doesn't focus the preview of the currently open tab anymore

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081112 Minefield/3.1b2pre ID:20081112034733

After a discussion on IRC I decided to file a new bug on that issue because it's a visual flaw which will probably confuse a lot of people. What will users expect to see when clicking on the all tabs button? A preview of all the open tabs? That's true. But which tab preview should be focused initially? In my opinion it's the one of the currently open tab. Means everyone can see very easily which tab is open at the moment.

That differs from the way we are handling it at the moment. With the latest check-in on bug 436304 we initially select the next tab in the list. That is odd because it doesn't give the feedback I mentioned above. Clicking on all tabs doesn't mean the user want to switch tabs.

Do we have a mockup of how all tabs should initially work?

Comment 1

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Attachment: v1

Don't advanceSelected when it's mouse opened.

Comment 2

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Henrik - If the All+Tabs panel is always called separately, I would agree that the current tabs should be selected.  

However, if we decide to go with Beltzner's MRU-strip plus all-tabs, I think the ideal interaction is for switching from the filmstrip to all-tabs to keep the same order and selection.  Since control+tab must focus on the last-used-tab for switching, having all-tabs move its selection to the current tab would be like moving one backwards.

So, perhaps instead we should keep the second tab highlighted, where the one in the top left is the current tab.  This means that clicking away from all-tabs gets you back to where you were, while pressing enter takes you to the last used tab.

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Just to summarize: We have two different ways in displaying the all-tabs panel. Directly by clicking on the icon in the tabbar or going over ctrl-tab and focusing the search field to make it sticky. The first way should select the preview of the currently open tab while the latter one selects the last-used tabs preview. That's what I meant with initially in my comment 0 and would make sense at all.

Comment 4

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This feature was removed from 3.1, so not blocking.

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Fixed by bug 465076. We don't focus any particular preview initially. However, when the cursor is in the search field, pressing enter will always pick the first visible preview.

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Verified fixed on trunk with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090722 Minefield/3.6a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) ID:20090722042136