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How do I open new tabs in the correct location, next to the tab they opened from, on Firefox for Android?

  • 3 replies
  • 6 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Hazel's

Hazel's
Hazel's
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'Open link in new tab' three times from tab 'a' should give 'a123bc' not 'abc123'.

Tabs on Firefox for Android are otherwise great to use, I like having the preview image of the site. But when I use 'open in new tab', the result is wrong: it opens at the end of my huge tab-pile, not next to the page it's opening from. This is simply incorrect, it leads to sorting my tabs by time not source, but I use my web browser for lots of different things during the day, so sorting by time is useless.

There are extensions that are supposed to fix it: they don't. I suspect they're mostly older ones that predate mobile versions of Firefox. I installed two of them anyway, always right and open tab next to current, neither one worked.

Also, does anyone know why Firefox does it incorrectly by default? It differs from other browsers like chrome and Opera (tested on Android), and is a gigantic annoyance for users who usually have more than 40 tabs open. How did Mozilla make this mistake?

Tab mix plus handles it for me on the desktop.

'Open link in new tab' three times from tab 'a' should give 'a123bc' not 'abc123'. Tabs on Firefox for Android are otherwise great to use, I like having the preview image of the site. But when I use 'open in new tab', the result is wrong: it opens at the end of my huge tab-pile, not next to the page it's opening from. This is simply incorrect, it leads to sorting my tabs by time not source, but I use my web browser for lots of different things during the day, so sorting by time is useless. There are extensions that are supposed to fix it: they don't. I suspect they're mostly older ones that predate mobile versions of Firefox. I installed two of them anyway, always right and open tab next to current, neither one worked. Also, does anyone know why Firefox does it incorrectly by default? It differs from other browsers like chrome and Opera (tested on Android), and is a gigantic annoyance for users who usually have more than 40 tabs open. How did Mozilla make this mistake? Tab mix plus handles it for me on the desktop.

All Replies (3)

Kevin
Kevin
  • Moderator
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I don't believe that there is a preference for the behavior you want on Firefox for Android. Extensions are not able to modify the Java UI of Firefox for Android.

Hazel's
Hazel's Question owner
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Right. Well, that explains *why* none of the extensions worked.... doesn't explain why they failed silently with no error message, but it's a start.

Is there any design document or justification for this behavior anywhere?

Do you think I should open a bug report / feature suggestion?

And, even though it's extremely unlikely that I'd actually do anything with it, would you know where to begin looking if I wanted to try and track down where this behavior is in the code?

Hazel's
Hazel's Question owner
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I've found I can long-press the tabs to drag them around in the tab 'list' (although it's more of a tab grid on my tablet). This doesn't fix the problem -- which happens when I open-in-new-tab twenty things at once and the order is completely wrong -- but it sort of lets me paper over the most annoying holes, at the cost of my own time and effort.

Still, this feels like it should be automated and built in and consistent with every other mobile browser so that I don't have to.