Opening bookmark folder closes open tabs

Oops, wrong smorgan :(

The dataloss situation is unfortunate, but I don't think that's the way to fix it. As you say, it's been discussed before, and fundamentally loading a tab group is a context switch. If someone is loading a tab group, they shouldn't have to know their current tab count and their tab group tab count to predict what's going to happen. And I'm having a hard time imagining anyone really wanting to keep, say, the last of their 10 current tabs when opening some completely different 9-tab group.

Undo is the real solution here, but perhaps in the short term there should be a warning like the closing-multiple-tab warning when stomping multiple tabs by loading a new tab group.

Yes, I got this problem too. When I click on the Mac News Tabs, it just overrides all my other tabs and opens those the mac news tabs. It eliminated all my other tabs, but the history of the first 3 tabs are retained.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Yes, I got this problem too. When I click on the Mac News Tabs, it just
> overrides all my other tabs and opens those the mac news tabs. It eliminated
> all my other tabs, but the history of the first 3 tabs are retained.

Yes, that's exactly what the bug is about, and that's the whole point of a tab group -- to open a specific set of tabs.

See comment 2 for how this will be handled.

cl

> Undo is the real solution here, but perhaps in the short term there should be a
> warning like the closing-multiple-tab warning when stomping multiple tabs by
> loading a new tab group.

Bug 316458.

I'm tempted to just WONTFIX this one right now; I can't decide if the warning would be worse than the deletion.

Would it make sense to have the warning only triggered when you're actually going to lose tabs? I.e., # of tabs in group < # of tabs open ?

what about just appending them to the end? It seems more likely this causes data loss and a lot of swearing than the usefulness of replacing the tabs. It's especially more likely since we added the cmd-keys, as the reporter points out.

Am I offbase here? I seem to be in the minority.

I hit this again last night (cmd-1 instead of cmd-`) trying to toggle windows and lost a bunch of tabs full of instructions that I couldn't easily restore.

If we change tab group behavior to append, we'd be going against Gecko-standards and we'd be inconsistent with our own behavior with single bookmarks, but I think a lot of people would be happy.

The inconsistencies nag me, though. Does cmd-click on a tab group in the bar then replace (where cmd-click on a bookmark opens in new), breaking the "cmd = open in new" paradigm?

It's thorny all the way around :/

(In reply to comment #7)
> If we change tab group behavior to append, we'd be going against
> Gecko-standards and we'd be inconsistent with our own behavior with single
> bookmarks, but I think a lot of people would be happy.

I'm not convinced of that; ignoring the data loss, having tab groups append makes exactly as much sense as making single bookmarks open in a new tab. I use tab groups constantly, and I can count on my fingers the number of times I've wanted to append.

I think an optional warning in the short-term--until we have undo--is the way to go, like all the other potential dataloss situations tabs seems to attract.

I didn't mean to imply that a change would make no one unhappy ;) only that lots of people had complained about tab groups clobbering current tabs.

The important question is, are a lot people complaining about that behavior in general, in which case it's worth considering changing the standard behavior, or just about it happening *accidentally*, in which case that's the problem to address?

*** Bug 372155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The only times I've hit this in the last year have been accidents (where I meant to Cmd-click on a tab group and failed to do so), for whatever that's worth.

I like the idea of throwing a warning sheet for this.

Created attachment 476567
implements the warning idea

I can take this for now. If we decide to WONTFIX it, that's OK too, I guess, but it's been four years and we still don't have tab-undo, so taking *something* is probably better than leaving this as-is.

Smokey had some concerns that users who use tab groups as a way of "wiping out" a window and starting over will be annoyed by this. I don't doubt they would ;) but that doesn't seem like a common use-case for tab groups, either. Anyone else have comments on how they use tab groups?

Comment on attachment 476567
implements the warning idea

>+"OpenTabGroupWithMultipleTabsOpenExpl" = "You have %u tabs open. Opening this tab group will destroy all but the left-most %u of them.";

s/open/in this window/ (or /open in this window/ perhaps)
s/destroy/close/
s/left-most %u of them/first %u tabs/

>+"DontOpenTabGroupButtonText" = "Don't Open";

Use a curly quote.

As noted on irc, this doesn't cover tab groups in menus of any sort, or Cmd-1 and friends.

These days my tab group usage is about 50% replace and 50% append (and my accidental triggering is almost exclusively mis-hitting a numeral with Cmd pressed). Tying the alert to "will this be destructive or not" certainly should make it less annoying for some of those replace cases.

However, for this fix to not annoy me when I do want to replace tabs, "Open" is also going to need a keyboard shortcut. Return and Esc both (rightly) trigger "Don’t Open" (and focus is also on the non-destructive button for FKA users), but something to keep me from having to mouse-and-click is necessary.

And please stop hand-editing patches ;) (For the benefit of others, in the strings hunk, @@ -42,16 +42,23 @@ should be @@ -42,16 +42,22 @@ for the patch to apply.)