One of the brilliant features of Firefox browser had been tabs that could be reordered within the browser to best suit the user’s current workflow or other whims. A cottage industry of Extensions/AddOns sprang up to further enhance that experience. For several months now I’ve needed to rely on an android tablet rather than a Linux laptop. So I cut Mozilla a lot of slack for my own personal teething pains making that transition.
It is a serious productivity loss to not be able to arrange the browser tabs in a custom order.
It is frustrating when a gesture that ought to merely scroll through tabs inadvertently causes a tab to close.
I don’t mind that a vocal majority prefer the swipe-left/swipe-right gesture but what does annoy me is when this forced gesture gets in the way of other navigation gestures. You only have to be slightly off vertical when gesturing to scroll and whichever tab you finger is resting on finds its way to the trash! … that is not cool. In a better world I could specify which gesture I prefer to use for closing a tab. In the BEST world I could drag and drop tabs to my heart’s content.
Please seriously consider enabling a user to reorder tabs to best suit each user’s unique needs.
Undo is a great safety net but the time that prompt lingers is very short and there is no way to access Undo after that prompt disappears. Yes, I am aware of the “Recently closed tabs” list but that list does not faithfully show recently CLOSED tabs. It seems to be more aware of the date a tab was last viewed and not the date when a tab was closed.
If you do not believe me then try this…
Close a tab. Let the undo prompt pass. You can find that closed tab in the list of Recently closed tabs and so click on it there to restore it if you wish.
That’s great … exactly what you would expect.
Now close a tab that you haven’t viewed in say 30days or more. (Take care not to accidentally view it just before closing it!) Let the Undo prompt pass. Now close any other tab. Let that Undo prompt pass. Now go searching the list of Recently closed tabs … you will find the most recent tab that you closed but not the tab closed immediately prior to that!
enjoy!
