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Issue 920829 link

Starred by 1 user
Status: Duplicate
Merged: issue 896929
Owner: ----
Closed: Jan 11
Cc:
█ tbergquist@chromium.org
bsep@chromium.org
dfried@chromium.org
pkasting@chromium.org
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: ----
Pri: 3
Type: Bug



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Tab selection after closing a new tab forgets opener on navigation

Project Member Reported by brucedaw...@chromium.org, Jan 11 
If I have many tabs open and have, say, tab three focused then I might want to open a new tab, view a page, close the tab, and have focus go back to the original tab (tab three).

This works in the pointless case - Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W - but not in the useful case - Ctrl+T, navigate to a site, Ctrl+W.

In this second case, where a navigation is introduced, closing the tab takes focus to the tab to the left - the new last tab. The last-active tab information is lost. This then requires using the mouse or keyboard to set focus back to where it used to be.


Ideally the last-active tab information would be remembered. However there is an alternate solution. Ideally both would be implemented. The alternate solution is to have a keyboard shortcut to open a new tab to the right of the current one. This solves this issue by making the tab-to-the-left and the last-active tab the same tab. It also makes it easy to create a new group of tabs somewhere in the middle of the tab strip, instead of the right-hand side being the only place. Ctrl+Alt+T maybe?

Comment 1 by pkasting@chromium.org, Jan 11

Cc: -pkasting@chromium.org bsep@chromium.org dfried@chromium.org tbergquist@chromium.org
Summary: Tab selection after closing a new tab forgets opener on navigation (was: Tab-focus when closing a new tab is inconsistent)
Adding an obscure keyboard shortcut to control new tab placement seems like an undesirable fix here.

It's not clear to me what correct behavior is in this case.  What if you open a new tab and then do (arbitrarily long series of things)?  What is the correct behavior?  For example, new tab, then you navigate twice, open three more tabs, close them, navigate some more, and then close this tab.  Do we still switch to the "last active before I did all that" tab?  If yes, then what is the signal that makes us forget the last active tab?  I'm concerned that getting more aggressive here may make the behavior unpredictable in negative ways.

Note that middle-clicking links from the current tab already does more of what you want here.

Replacing myself with people who are thinking more directly about this sort of thing these days.

Comment 2 by bsep@chromium.org, Jan 11 

I thought I fixed this already? See  bug 896929 , I think it just hasn't made its way to Stable.

As for "open new tab adjacent to current tab," we've pondered just making Ctrl-T do that, but it's a scary change to make unilaterally. Plus, anecdotally, we've had mixed reactions to whether pressing Ctrl-T is related or related to your current task.

Comment 3 by bsep@chromium.org, Jan 11 

Related or *unrelated.

Comment 4 by brucedaw...@chromium.org, Jan 11 

Ah - indeed  bug 896929  is a duplicate and it does fix this case.

I'm not sure why doing two navigations instead of one causes the last tab to be forgotten, but maybe that is necessary to avoid confusion - I'm not sure I've thought through it all. However testing on canary does show that my use-case works the way I want it to there.

I agree that changing the behavior of Ctrl+T is scary. I think that Ctrl+T is sometimes related to the current task, and sometimes related (I mean unrelated :-), so changing the behavior will just annoy people in a different situation. I think that you would either need to add a different command, or just leave the current behavior.

Middle-click on a link works, but sometimes there isn't a convenient link.

Comment 5 by bsep@chromium.org, Jan 11

Mergedinto: 896929
Status: Duplicate (was: Untriaged)
Closing as duplicate. I do want to out how to make it easy for power users to open a new tab adjacent to the current tab, but I don't think we need a bug open for it while we're discussing. We can't use Ctrl-Alt-T since Ctrl-Alt is reserved for a11y tools.

In the meantime, it's not a keyboard shortcut, but you can right-click the current tab and select "New tab".
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