688097 - Closing Tabs Shouldn't Cross Tab Group Boundaries

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect)

Description

[Blair Mitchelmore]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110917 Firefox/9.0a1
Build ID: 20110917030857

Steps to reproduce:

This is a bug that pops up only after an amount of use that is hard to describe as a series of steps. 


Actual results:

Basically, there are times when closing a tab will switch you to a different Tab Group. I don't think this should ever happen.


Expected results:

If there are other tabs in that Tab Group, the browser should switch to the most recently accessed tab in that group — or the nearest, I'm not actually sure what Firefox's default tab closing behaviour is.

If there are no other tabs in that Tab Group but there are App Tabs available, switch the to most recently access App Tab (or as I said nearest or whatever if there's a different default behaviour) but keep the now empty Tab Group in context.

If there are no other tabs in that Tab Group and there are no App Tabs available, delete the Tab Group and switch to the Tab Group interface letting the user select which Tab Group they want to switch the context to.

These options boil down to not switch Tab Group contexts without direct user interaction. Switching between Tab Groups without that sort of direct action leads to a confusing and annoying interface, one that will make users abandon Tab Groups despite their advantages (at least in my case).

Comment 1

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Can you reproduce this issue in Safe Mode?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Do you by chance use the switch-to tab feature when this issue occurs?

Comment 3

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Changing OS to all, as this issue has been reported on Linux as well in the above duplicated bug.

Comment 4

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Blair, do you use any add-ons? Does this issue still occur in safe-mode? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 5

[jakub.g]

Based on this: http://support.mozilla.com/de/questions/843048
I was able to reproduce the bug in the deterministic order of actions. It looks like extension problem, not Fx internal problem.

Particularly to me, this seems to be problem with All-in-One-Gestures extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/all-in-one-gestures/) - having it disabled (with leaving some 40 other extensions enabled), the order of actions described below wasn't switching the tab groups any more.

I will contact the author of the add-on. There might be problems also with the other extensions as well however.

---
STR (TG = tab group):
1. Launch Panorama, Create empty TG1, TG2.
2. Open TG1 and open tab1(URL1) as the new tab.
3. With Panorama, switch to TG2 and open tab2(URL2) as the new tab.
4. With Panorama, switch back to TG1.
5. Open new empty tab3 and tab4. Close tab4 and tab3. After closing tab3, you will be switched from TG2 to TG1.

Interestingly, in step 5 opening & closing tab3 is enough in Fx7.0.1, but in Fx8b3 you must open tab3 and tab4.

Comment 6

[jakub.g]

I have tested also in new profile (Fx 7.0.1, Fx 8.0b3) with AIOG as the only extension enabled (problem occurs) and no extensions (problem does not occur).

Comment 7

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Thank you, Jamie for investigating this further! I'll close this as invalid because it's an add-on problem and should be solved by the add-on author (I contacted him to make sure he's aware of that problem.)