970102 - Opening new tab from pinned tab at the end of the tab list

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

Attachment: newTabFromPinned.patch

Users who have a lot of opened tabs might experience this issue. It's frustrating when you open a new tab from a pinned one, it will take you at the top of the tab list, and then you will have to jump between ~200 tabs it would be really harmful :(

I think that opening in the next tab is a great feature, but when it's about pinned tabs and massive opened tabs it's not.
 
I don't agree with arguments given in bug 539986, We can't do like chrome and because we have different user experiences, (chrome users can't really use a lot of tabs it wouldn't be practical) 

What about |browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent| pref ?  As I said, opening next to the selected tab is a great feature, so if we disable the pref we will lose it, so why not keep both ?

Comment 1

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

Attachment: newTabFromPinnedV2.patch

Fixing coding style

Comment 2

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Comment on attachment 8373061 [details] [diff] [review]
newTabFromPinnedV2.patch

While I see your point, I'm worried about this introducing yet another behavior of tab opening. It sure would be beneficial for people with lots of tabs, but irritating for people with fewer tabs (which is the majority).

Do we have any data on possible correlations between using pinned tabs and having many tabs open?

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

(In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #2)
> Comment on attachment 8373061 [details] [diff] [review]
> newTabFromPinnedV2.patch
> 
> While I see your point, I'm worried about this introducing yet another
> behavior of tab opening.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Opening tabs at the end of the tab bar isn't new behavior, we already do it for empty tabs.

> It sure would be beneficial for people with lots of
> tabs, but irritating for people with fewer tabs (which is the majority).

The status quo is kind of irritating as well. I'd even say it's more irritating. E.g. if you have two pinned tabs and some unpinned ones and click an external link from the first pinned tab, a new tab will be added before the other unpinned tabs but after the second pinned tab. So it won't actually be grouped with the tab it was opened from. I don't think this is useful behavior.

Comment 4

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

(In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #2)
> Do we have any data on possible correlations between using pinned tabs and
> having many tabs open?

Well I don't really have data on what's the most case is used but all I know is that being able to use a lot of tabs is one of the most feature that users are proud of. If you have any data that would be nice :)

Comment 5

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> (In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #2)

> The status quo is kind of irritating as well. I'd even say it's more
> irritating. E.g. if you have two pinned tabs and some unpinned ones and
> click an external link from the first pinned tab, a new tab will be added
> before the other unpinned tabs but after the second pinned tab. So it won't
> actually be grouped with the tab it was opened from. I don't think this is
> useful behavior.

You're right, I didn't saw that, but I think I can update the patch to fix it.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

Comment on attachment 8373061 [details] [diff] [review]
newTabFromPinnedV2.patch

(In reply to Alexandre BM (:rednaks) from comment #5)
> (In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #3)
> > (In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #2)
> 
> > The status quo is kind of irritating as well. I'd even say it's more
> > irritating. E.g. if you have two pinned tabs and some unpinned ones and
> > click an external link from the first pinned tab, a new tab will be added
> > before the other unpinned tabs but after the second pinned tab. So it won't
> > actually be grouped with the tab it was opened from. I don't think this is
> > useful behavior.
> 
> You're right, I didn't saw that, but I think I can update the patch to fix
> it.

I'm not sure what exactly you'd fix in addition to what this patch is already doing.

Comment 7

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #6)
> I'm not sure what exactly you'd fix in addition to what this patch is
> already doing.

Oh sorry I was taking about the behavior that you mentioned above (the two pinned tabs and how they are not groupped), forget about it, I reproduced the steps on the wrong version of firefox and I though that my patch was wrong.

So what's next now ?

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

Philipp, can you reply to comment 3? In particular, I don't think your "fewer tabs" distinction made much sense -- you get undesirable behavior as soon as there are two pinned tabs.

Comment 9

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

I just talked this through with Madhava as well.
The current implementation of pinned tabs approximates the behavior of normal tabs as good as possible. Yes, it is not exactly the same once you have more than one pinned tab, but it is still close.
The proposed behavior has some merits, but I don't see enough benefits to justify changing the behavior people already know and that is closer to the general mental model of how tabs work.

Therefore I wouldn't recommend changing the behavior.

Comment 10

[Alexandre BM (:rednaks)]

If it's not possible to implement the behavior that I'm proposing, we can at least add a new pref, it will not affect the actual behavior and we can see how many user are enabling it. If we have enough feedback, that could be a good reason to implement it in the future.

Comment 11

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

(In reply to Alexandre BM (:rednaks) from comment #10)
> If it's not possible to implement the behavior that I'm proposing, we can at
> least add a new pref, it will not affect the actual behavior and we can see
> how many user are enabling it. If we have enough feedback, that could be a
> good reason to implement it in the future.

I think an add-on would be a very suitable place for this.

Comment 12

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

(In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #11)
> I think an add-on would be a very suitable place for this.

For reference, the Reporter created the Addon "Append New Tab":
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/append-new-tab/
https://github.com/rednaks/appendedNewTab

Comment 13

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

(In reply to XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall] from comment #12)
> (In reply to Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] from comment #11)
> > I think an add-on would be a very suitable place for this.
> 
> For reference, the Reporter created the Addon "Append New Tab":
> https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/append-new-tab/
> https://github.com/rednaks/appendedNewTab

That's great! Thumbs up :rednaks!