Tabbed Browsing/User Interface Design/Restoring Closed Tabs
Users accidentally close tabs, some more often than others. Especially with the switch to closebuttons on tabs and the higher likelihood of missed clicks, this is important to prevent dataloss.
Contents
Use Cases
- User is rapidly closing tabs, and accidentally closes one or two extra.
- User hits the closebutton when trying to switch tabs
- User presses Ctrl-W by mistake.
Other ways to mitigate dataloss factors
- Strong history search to find page again.
- Warn on tab/window close when form data has been entered
- Only display closebutton on active tab
Tab Storage
The most straightforward implementation is to hide tabs, and close after a (pref-controlled) timeout, defaulting to 60 seconds. There is a case where someone may not realize they closed the wrong tab, but this is more of a corner case. Some of the session saver work may pay off in the longer term.
Possible UI placement
Tabs Menu
If a tab menu were to be implemented at some point (for overflow, etc) then it would be trivial to add a submenu to show recently closed tabs. A tabs menu is a little ugly, and hopefully unnecessary.
Context Menu
The tab/tabbar context menu should include a Restore Closed Tabs option that simply reopens all closed tabs. May not be immediately discoverable.
Opera-esque Trashcan button on tabbar
While closed tabs are available to be reopened, show the icon with a dropmarker. This is not really accessible, or obvious, and with the timeout it'll vanish, possibly unexpectedly. There's also a clutter factor.
Add to the Undo stack
Problematic in that tab navigation and closing isn't generally associated with editing actions, leading to being unintuitive.
Go Menu
Closed tabs could be shown in the Go menu in the order they were closed (in addition to pages in the order in which they were loaded).
