=== Parent identity ===

Use case: opening tabs from multiple pages of search results

I google something, glance thru hits 1-10, right click 1 3 and 4, click Next page, glance thru 11-20, right click 13 14 and 19, Next page, glance thru 21-30, right click 22 and 29. Now the tabs are ordered

A0 A22 A29 A13 A14 A19 A1 A3 A4

(where A0 is the search result, and A(x) is hit number x). The tabs essentially appears in random order. I usually want to read them in the order i found them.

Partial solution: relax the “identity” concept of what a parent is.

Clearly, in google an many other contexts, going to Next Page should not change the parent status of a tab. It should still be the head of its group or sub-group. What about a solution where a tab always keeps its parenthood when its content changes (following a link)? It will work in the google case, but it might break other use cases. Deciding what is a tab’s or a page’s identity requires a lot of thought.

=== Visual clue ===

There is no visual clue (ver 3.6.8) how the tabs are grouped. Firefox obviously has an internal representation of “parents” or “groups” of tabs, and one should not be surprised that users get confused if it is invisible to them.

For this feature to be useful as intended, there should at least be an easy way to see what tabs are parents, or where the group boundaries are.

A0,A1,A2,B0,B1,B2

If a child were created on A1, the result would be:

A0,A2,B0,B1,B2,C0,C1

Where C0 was formerly A1.

Or

A0,A2,C0,C1,B0,B1,B2

Now I have to keep in my head: When I added the tab, was it a child? Was it the n’th child? Was it a child of the n’th child? Where did the n+1th child go if I added a child to the n’th child? I can’t find anything. Way too many rules.

With the old behavior I could remember approximately where tabs were based on how long ago I opened it. The more recently opened, the farther right. Simple!

The first tabbed browser I used was Maxthon (heavily modified IE). Maxthon had this behaviour, where the new tab would open next to the parent tab. This was great if you have say 3 tabs with 3 different topics, because they would remained grouped no matter the order you open them in.

Example: Topic A, B, C
Maxthon: A0,A3,A2,A1,B0,B2,B1,C0,C3,C2,C1
old firefox: A0,B0,C0,A1,B1,A2,C1,C2,B2,C3,A3

I find the initial sequence to be more organized.
When I started using firefox (because on Linux there’s no Maxthon), I had a lot of FRUSTRATION because of this behaviour, but I got used to it eventually, despite some nostalgies.

Now, I see Firefox is realizing people used tabbed browsers for tabs (sometimes a lot), and are trying to improve the user experience.
Some of you are so conservative, you don’t know what’s good for you. I am pretty sure if Firefox was like Maxthon from the beginning and now they decided to be like you are used to, there would be at least the same amount of frustration.

Really, your arguments are very subjective.

On top of all this, Chrome arranges them even better:

A0,A1,A2,A3,B0,B1,B2,C0,C1,C2,C3

where higher numbers indicate tabs opened later.
The last sequence is probably the ideal one.
This way your tabs are grouped by topic, and the last tab from a topic is the last opened tab.

If Firefox implemented this, then if you Open Google, do a search and open a bunch of things in new tabs, it would be like the old behaviour.

And if you have TWO Google and search TWO Different Things, it would behave like TWO different browsers, so the search results will never mix.

I know I wrote a lot, but if you think about it you will realize how RIGHT I am.

Alex G.

I am using Chrome instead of Firefox for this reason ONLY.

I HATE you bastards. . . with a passion. This is ridiculous, what’s next, what next are you going to do so that I have to change a setting in about:config every time I go to a new machine again, eh?

Are you going to force a skin on us too? Like Chrome tries to? You going to set some fancy pretty little crap theme as default with no menubar and it’s own window manager?

This is stupid, why are you following the underdogs? You have THE second most popular browser on the market, part of the reason I have always hated Safari, Chrome and Opera is BECAUSE of their strange non-firefox-like tab behavior and then you go and pull this crap.

To quote a brilliant man, “If change is unnecessary, it is necessary NOT to change.”

A very disagreeable change if you have many tabs going.

Please give an option so the position of new tabs can be selected.

Awful.

With effort exerted to change, why was another approach not used:

* Certain tabs can be marked as “Group heading” tabs, and will for example be colored differently, or have some visual marker

* New tabs opened within that group, will be opened, at the end of the group, that is in chronological order

These options could be modified easily, in the Options menu (ex: the new reverse-chronological “improvement”, within a group, if one so wishes)

This is one of a range of possibilities. Imitation will likely prove to be a failure.

“New tabs opened via the new tab button, File/New Tab… menu, Ctrl + T, etc. will still be opened to the end of the tab bar, as it is not possible to know if it’s contents will be related to the current tab or not.”

Nooooooo wrong. It needs to open up those tabs next to the current tab.

At least give me a setting to be able to change it back, geez.

then

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

Thanks!!!