Fenix: FNX-5269 ⁃ Tab switcher should show the current tab in home screen

Created on 19 Apr 2019 · 8Comments · Source: mozilla-mobile/fenix

Steps to reproduce

Open Fenix
Open multiple tab
Tap tab switcher

Expected behavior

The tab that the user is switching away from is visible on the home screen without scrolling. The user can than switch back to that tab if they made a mistake, or easily go to the next or previous tabs as they wish.

Fennec does this correctly.

Actual behavior

The home screen is loaded and the top of the home screen is shown.

Device information

Android device: Pixel 2
Fenix version: 1.0.1916 #11091215

HomeScreen Tabs P2 ready

Source

yoasif

Most helpful comment

Yes, a stable tab (as in browser tab, not the tab key) order means I can build a mental picture of my tabs - them reordering themselves all the time doesn't help with that (and would conflict with manual control as in #2487). And now that opening a link in a new tab finally seems to open the new tab next to the parent tab, this subsequent automatic reordering would also break the idea of having related tabs grouped together.

buttercookie42 on 16 May 2019

👍2

All 8 comments

So you basically want the currently selected tab to always be at the top of the tab list?

ekager on 19 Apr 2019

I'm not saying that the tab position in the tab stack should change - the list of tabs should just be scrolled so that the tab I am switching away from is at the top of the screen.

The search / address bar is sticky already, so no change there.

So if I had tabs:

tab 1
tab 2
tab 3
tab 4

and I am in tab 3 and tap the tab switcher button, I should then see:

_search box_

tab 3
tab 4

but I can still scroll up to see tabs 1 and 2.

Hope that helps.

yoasif on 19 Apr 2019

topotropic on 6 May 2019

Let's sort tabs on start screen after recently interacted with. This way, the latest viewed is always at the top. (Background: in our foundational research we observed that mobile browsers are often used for quick, independent, informational searches – also with the Collections feature we help people to organize tabs and structure their longer term research so that they don't need to rely on leaving tabs open)

topotropic on 15 May 2019

@topotropic Are you saying that the tab listing should be ordered by recently used? That would break #1826 and the secondary use case of tabs remaining in the same relative position to one another.

At least on desktop, the preference to switch tabs based on recently used order is a preference, which would be nice to have - especially since in my brief testing, no other Android browser does this.

Screenshot from 2019-05-15 11-50-09