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Home Page should act as a tab on Firefox mobile

Denes
Making moves

In Firefox mobile, the Home Page kind of exists in its on realm. If you open a New Page while on a website, you can't swipe back using the url bar. You have to click the Tabs button, and click the last Page there. But from here, you can't swipe left on the url bar to go to the New Tab (the Home Page) again, because it disappeared. You have to go to 3 dot > New Tab again.

Furthermore, if you type in some website on a New Tab, and accidentally press back, the you once again have to navigate through tabs to get back to your open website.

Being able to swipe back and forth between an open website and a new tab would enable to check back at what you wanted to search up.

The 3 Dots > New Tab clicks could be easily shortened by adding an option to enable a ghost New Tab, which would always be one to the right of the very last real Tab. So if you are on the last real Tab, on example.com, and click newtab.test, which opens in a new tab, from left to right the order of tabs would be: example.com, newtab.test, Ghost New Tab/Home Page. So it's always the rightmost page, and only stays in place after a website is opened in it.

The current behaviour that pressing back on a Tab, in which the first website is open therefore there are no more sites to go back to, brings you back to a Home Page could be kept as it would be fully compatible with the above suggestion.

1 REPLY 1

callum
Making moves

I would agree, but I would also extend that to saying there just needs to be more gestures and improved navigation overall. I don't know how Android is but on iOS the ability to swipe around for navigating the UI and dismissing menus and such is pretty lacking. The way it is right now, you're presented with lots of buttons to press and tabs to navigate to all at different heights on the screen, which can make it fatiguing and sometimes challenging to use the app one-handed or for people with mobility issues such as myself. I used Arc before switching everything to Firefox(❤️) and their mobile app was extremely navigable through gestures which made searching for something feel effortless. Gestures also have the added benefit of, for me at least, making an app feel so much more responsive and snappy by letting me navigate it quickly and smoothly 🙂