898782 - [meta] - Tab switcher Synced Tabs papercuts

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1002573

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Hit the Switch Tabs button. Choose the Synced Tabs, um, tab. 

Scroll down this list and pick a tab. The picker closes to show the page. 

You'll see several non-ideal behaviors. 

* if you're quick, you can reopen the pane before the page loads, and start interacting with it again (e.g., to open another tab). When the page loads, this UI resets, losing your place. 

* sometimes, for no reason, you'll stop scrolling and it'll reset your position in the tabs list. Same thing? 

* every time you enter and leave the Switch Tab UI, it flicks you back to Open Tabs. 

* device dividers are slim grey text. If you have more than a couple of tabs, this requires reading, not scrubbing, to find. I suggest adding some striking visual (an orange line?) to allow fast fling/scan behavior, and/or stopping fast flings at the boundary of the new device section. 

* there's no way (swipe-selecting?) to pick and open multiple tabs. To achieve that now needs tap, tap, scroll, search, tap, wait, repeat.

Comment 1

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Thanks Richard, this is great feedback. 
> 
> * if you're quick, you can reopen the pane before the page loads, and start
> interacting with it again (e.g., to open another tab). When the page loads,
> this UI resets, losing your place. 
> 
> * sometimes, for no reason, you'll stop scrolling and it'll reset your
> position in the tabs list. Same thing? 

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by these two (I can't seem to reproduce this behaviour), but they sound like bugs. 

> * every time you enter and leave the Switch Tab UI, it flicks you back to
> Open Tabs. 

This is by design, as we want to direct people to tabs that are actually open vs. a list of tabs that need to be opened. I can see how this could be confusing though, in the specific case where you want to open more than one tab from another device. Perhaps your suggestion below of allowing multiple remote tabs to be opened at once would help this.

> * device dividers are slim grey text. If you have more than a couple of
> tabs, this requires reading, not scrubbing, to find. I suggest adding some
> striking visual (an orange line?) to allow fast fling/scan behavior, and/or
> stopping fast flings at the boundary of the new device section. 

Very good point. We can take a look at this.

> * there's no way (swipe-selecting?) to pick and open multiple tabs. To
> achieve that now needs tap, tap, scroll, search, tap, wait, repeat.

Also a great point, and a feature we should definitely explore designs for.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Ian Barlow (:ibarlow) from comment #1)

> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by these two (I can't seem to
> reproduce this behaviour), but they sound like bugs. 

Yeah, I think they are, but I was filing on my phone so I didn't want to file two or three bugs on the same topic :D

The behavior is simply:

* Open the tab tray, pick Synced Tabs
* Tap one, and immediately open the tray again.
* You'll be back where you were... and then when the page hits some loading point, the tab tray resets.

If you're slow, it looks like the tab tray always opens in local tabs, with the position set to the current tab. If you're fast, you can see where we reset the interface.

The second item seems to be related to the first (same symptoms), and is probably something funky like the loading point being a page load event that can trigger in the background while you're actually back in the tab list, doing something else.

We should probably switch this behavior to reposition the tab list immediately on picking a new URL to visit, with the assumption that next time you come back you'll want to pick an existing tab. (We could also do it every time you open the tray, but that will really infuriate indecisive users!)


Do you want me to file individual bugs for all of the things in Comment 0, or leave them here, or something else? Not sure how you like to prioritize/batch UI work, or if some of these should wait for fig.

Comment 3

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Richard, I would suggest filing individual bugs for these, and perhaps have them block this one so it becomes the meta bug for "synced tab list papercuts"

Comment 4

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Duping forward I guess, we'll try again