Thread: Undo/Command-Z should reopen last closed window or tab
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Stormchild
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2006-08-21, 05:54 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Len Case
This is the same reason the stop and reload buttons in OmniWeb are not the same button--you go to press on the stop and just before you get there, it turns into a reload. You don't want an unpredictable interface
Agreed. The combined stop/reload button in Safari can be a real pain sometimes.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Len Case
The nice thing about the history menu containing recently closed windows is:
  1. it is predictable--no guessing about what the user meant and
  2. it is discoverable--the history menu is where you probably go already
That seems like the best way to solve this problem. I think it would be confusing for most users if undo behaves differently depending on whether you've got a text field focused or not. (I'm not sure what other factors there are, but I notice that you can only undo/redo changes in a text field while it's focused -- which is how it should be IMO.) It actually would never have occured to me to use undo to restore a closed tab. After all, the undo command is in the Edit menu, and closing and opening tabs is not editing (not that I want to crack open the topic of menu semantics, cause that's a can of worms).

So, I can imagine a couple different ways the History menu approach could work.
  1. Add items to the history as soon as you open them, but when closing a tab, move its history item to the top.
  2. Only add items to the history when the tab is closed.

Also, by "closed", I mean: You either closed the tab, or a new URL was loaded into it. I realize you could just use the back button to go back to a page if you didn't actually close the tab, but my thought is that pages should be added to the history in a consistent manner, so that whenever you "leave a page" (by closing the tab or going to a new URL), that's when it gets added to (or moved to the top of) the history. Otherwise, URLs would get moved to the top if the tab was closed, but not when replacing the tab content with a new URL, and from a user's point of view, that's just two different ways to get rid of a page.
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