498272 - Tab-switching window (Ctrl-Tab) should wait a few milliseconds before opening

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Luz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090610 Minefield/3.6a1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090610 Minefield/3.6a1pre

A very quick Ctrl-Tab keystroke should alternate tabs instantly, without popping up the tab-switching widget. Given the pretty large size of the widget and the time it takes to render, the "blink" it makes when you just want to swap tabs is very noticeable.

In other words, the widget should wait for the Ctrl key being held for a couple milliseconds before showing up.

This is similar to how Cmd-Tab on OS X (10.5) behaves.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Having numerous tabs open, press Ctrl-Tab very quickly, releasing the Ctrl key very fast.
Actual Results:  
There's a flicker of the tab-switching widget before switching tabs, which can be distracting (possibly even irritating) and delays the actual switch (the widget is quick, but still takes some time to render when you have three pages worth of tabs).

Expected Results:  
Very fast tab swapping, with no interruptions or distractions.

Comment 1

[Bjartur Thorlacius]

I strongly agree and it should also be a pref (in Prefs>Tabs in the GUI, not only about:config) to control for how long (and whether) it should be held and whether it should be held until <tab> (the kbd button) is released.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I strongly agree and it should also be a pref (in Prefs>Tabs in the GUI, not
> only about:config) to control for how long (and whether) it should be held

You're suggesting that we put something like "When pressing Ctrl+Tab, wait [___] milliseconds before showing previews" in the preferences UI?

> whether it should be held until <tab> (the kbd button) is released.

I'm not sure what that means.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Fixed by bug 465076.

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I still can trigger the Ctrl_Tab UI by switching fast through the list of tabs. Seems like that 100ms are not enough. Anyone who can see this too with the recent Minefield build?

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I've increased the delay to 200 ms. Let's see how that goes.

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3402cd967828

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

That looks much better. I cannot hit the ctrl-tab ui anymore accidentally. It only shows up when leaving the tab key - which is the expected behavior.

Verified fixed with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090728 Minefield/3.6a1pre ID:20090728032726