Dear Mozilla Firefox Team,
In FF v116.0 the behavior of the “Undo Close Tab” Keyboard shortcut changed.
Previously, one could reopen closed tabs or windows independently using their own respective keyboard shortcuts.
Since v116.0 the keyboard shortcuts to reopen tabs acts as a global “undo” across all windows (even closed windows).
This makes the feature’s functionality so much worse in my opinion, that I at first filed a bug report for it:
Through this I identified that the change was made intentionally, as can be read here:
I am personally extremely passionate about this feature and would like to plead the case for the original functionality to be either restored or brought back as a user setting.
I love Firefox. Firefox is a true workhorse for browsing, contributing to the web as well as research. The previous functionality of this feature allowed me to use Firefox (over all other browsers out there) for my daily tasks comprising extended research efforts, as every window kept it’s own history of recently closed tabs and restoring each worked independently of each other.
I use FF windows to group thematically related tabs in one window. I have at least 2-3 windows open and am switching between them at all times.
I sometimes have tens of windows open in parallel, often for months, many of them minimized (I work on Mac) and waiting for their time to come.
Individual windows may represent different parallel research sessions, kept available and quickly accessible / ready for me to jump back into the individual session and continue where I left off.
With the old functionality I could pull up a window from 4 months ago, remember that during that research session I had recently closed a tab which had the subject matter info I need, restore a couple tabs via keyboard and voilà.
Even for just daily work, I’ll be in a workflow, open a separate “Ad-hoc” window to look up 2-3 things, close that “Ad-hoc” window and wish to proceed with my work. Often I wish to reopen a closed tab of my actual work window because of what I just found out in my “Ad-hoc” window. This workflow is now completely broken.
I could provide more affected patterns.
The feature change “dumbs down” the functionality, which I understand may be the intention and with 10 years UX & product experience myself I understand my ways of working may not match those of the average FF user or intended user behavior.
I personally dislike the change as the feature really differentiated FF as a pro tool for my web browsing needs.
I am seriously frightened this functionality may not come back and I will lose access to the feature which has been my main reason for choosing and never switching away from FF.
This has been at the core of my daily workflow for almost 2 decades now.
I implore you guys and gals to consider this feedback and reintroduce the reason I preferred FF over all the other browsers for all these years, at least as a user or configuration preference.
Thank you for your consideration.
A Firefox Fan
