607893 - The last primary window should never be closed with the last tab

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[ithinc]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; zh-CN; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; zh-CN; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

For the time being, the default behavior in Firefox is to close the window with the last tab. This is only meaningful when there are more windows than one. The last primary window should never be closed when pressing Ctrl + W, or middle-clicking the last tab. I know there is a hidden preference "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab". I mean this preference should only work for a 2nd or more window.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Not sure what decision we made. Alex, can you please help out?

Comment 2

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I'm assuming that the main motivation is that our start up time makes relaunching the application to get a new window frustrating?  I personally think that bug 594161 is the best way to deal with this.  We don't really know if the user wants to close Firefox or just that tab, and preventing them from closing the tab has the built in assumption (which may or may not be correct) that they do not want to close Firefox.  Supporting undo is better than forcing behavior.

Comment 3

[ithinc]

If people want to close the window, they can press Ctrl+Shift+W, or click the X button of the window, no need to bind the last tab to the whole window. If the last primary window is closed, how to undo? It's quite annoying a thing.

Comment 4

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

I'm going to ditto Faaborg-of-the-past here.  The only reason I know of to preserve the last window is because of startup time of launching a new window, as far as I know.  The way to solve this is to address the delay, not prevent a window from closing.  Thanks for filing, ithinc!