Yeah, this is something that's bugged me too. Adding the IOS label here as well, as I think the behavior is a problem there as well (both on phones and tablets).

This might also relate to the question of whether the NTP itself should be considered a tab or not.

+1. Short of any other options, opening the NTP sounds like the right thing to do to me as well.

I'd like to move quickly to fix this. Who is the PM who can make a decision?

+nickrad -- I think this fits into Chrome Touch? Or at least, it's another problem for the NTP.

BTW, agree that this state shouldn't exist, but I don't know how often it comes up. (Not "I don't think this happens." I just honestly don't know -- and I'm pretty sure we don't have logging for it.) While people do close tabs more than anything else, the "Close all tabs" menu item is actually not used much, about 0.1% of interactions with the switcher when I ran the numbers. (visual breakdown: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rckzthM2ttcYHF2BmcJZH5WMfFN1v3zb6FIbIxtYToM/edit#slide=id.g2bbea797e8_0_138) Unfortunately the tab-count logging I've looked at is recorded at time of navigation, which wouldn't be possible with 0 tabs.

This was discussed a long time ago for Bling. When user closes all tabs, immediately popping up a NTP seems strange and unexpected. However, when Bling restarts, it will not show a blank tab switcher state. A NTP is created when Bling starts.

+cleer and hannahs@ - this feedback came up during our Chrome Home studies as well. 

nickrad@ - will you please triage to the appropriate PM or UXer?

Re #5 - if Chrome for Android restarts (cold start), we will open an NTP. If Chrome is already running and brought back to the foreground e.g. through Android Recents, we do not open an NTP, but perhaps we should.

I'm a little unclear on the suggested fix: when you "close all tabs" the recommendation is that we close them all, but then open a new tab? That's not closing all tabs. 

The assertion 6-7 years ago was that this would be frustrating to some users who like getting the closure of seeing all the tabs actually being closed. 

That might depend on the relation of an NTP and the tab model.

Another alternative is that on phone form factors we should treat the NTP as a UI/view, not a tab. So when you close all tabs, you pop up the NTP but the tab count would still say 0 or something similar. That way the user doesn't have to open a new tab to access the NTP in the first place, but still has the ability to "close all their tabs".

This also fixes the issue of possibly having multiple NTPs open at once.

Long term I agree with zea -- I don't think that connecting the NTP to tab creation makes all that much sense. But I'd want to square that with the story for the NTP generally.

In the short term, maybe we should just auto-create an NTP whenever Chrome is foregrounded instead of only on cold start? I think that's probably a P2 despite how awkward it is; I personally doubt this state is very common.

+Janice FYI

Picking up this discussion.

Notes on current behavior:

- if a "Home page" is configured on the device, closing the last tab closes Chrome (and then open the "Home page" on next Chrome open)
- if no "Home page", then the browser is in an empty 0-tab state (what Matt outlined in this bug)

My suggestion is to unify the behavior for consistency to one of the following:

1. Closing all tabs is interpreted as intent to close Chrome as well (per the current "Home page set" behavior)
2. Closing all tabs should put the user into the same state they'd expect to be in if they had started Chrome with no tabs left open previously -> which would be either mean showing the NTP (if no "Home page" is set) or the Home page itself (if set)

I'd vote/prefer #2 - #1 seems inconsistent to me wrt how other Android apps behave.

I'm removing the iOS label to ensure the discussion remains focused on Clank.