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Back button not returning to home, but opening a new tab instead

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  • Last reply by Paul

giulio.martini.mail
giulio.martini.mail
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Good morning, I am writing this post because I am rather fed up with the behavior of Firefox on Android when pressing the back button. Whenever I press the back button on my device to return to FF's standard homepage, what actually happens is that the current tab goes in the background and a new blank home tab is opened instead. This ends up in having to manually close tabs to avoid them piling up in the background. Is there any custom settings to avoid this? It is REALLY annoying. I know I can tell FF to automatically close tabs after a while, but this is just a bad patch and not the solution to the problem. By the way, old FF did not behave this way before last year's major update, and I've been waiting for at least a year for this problem to be fixed. Thank you in advance for your attention and your support.

Good morning, I am writing this post because I am rather fed up with the behavior of Firefox on Android when pressing the back button. Whenever I press the back button on my device to return to FF's standard homepage, what actually happens is that the current tab goes in the background and a new blank home tab is opened instead. This ends up in having to manually close tabs to avoid them piling up in the background. Is there any custom settings to avoid this? It is REALLY annoying. I know I can tell FF to automatically close tabs after a while, but this is just a bad patch and not the solution to the problem. By the way, old FF did not behave this way before last year's major update, and I've been waiting for at least a year for this problem to be fixed. Thank you in advance for your attention and your support.

All Replies (5)

Paul
Paul
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Hi

We are currently testing a home button, that will take you back to the home screen, in the Nightly version of Firefox for Android available from the Google Play store.

giulio.martini.mail
giulio.martini.mail Question owner
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Hi Seburo,

I have already tested the Nightly version as well (which by the way is way way better under many aspects and has become my default browser).

The home button is fantastic, since it avoids having to press the back button many times (or keeping it pressed to select the desidered step back), but it does not solve the problem.

Pressing the home button does not bring the current tab back to home, but simply brings up a home screen, putting the current tab in the background. If a new link is clicked in the "home tab" which appears, a new tab is opened.

Therefore, it does not solve the problem of piling up tabs in the background, which is unfortunate.

Modified by giulio.martini.mail

Paul
Paul
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What would you like Firefox for Android to do?

giulio.martini.mail
giulio.martini.mail Question owner
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I'll make an example, hoping to make things clearer. Let's assume I open a new tab on PC and a new tab on Android.

If I press "home" on the PC tab, the tab goes back to the home page. When I type something into the address/search bar from the home page, the tab goes to the inserted link/performs the web search. Result: I have one opened tab.

If I press "home" on a tab on Android, the tab SORT OF goes back to the home page (the home screen is shown, but in reality the tab is still on the current website). When I type something into the address/search bar from the shown home page, a new tab is opened to reach the address or perform the web search. The first tab is still present in the background. Result: I now have two opened tabs.

Rinse and repeat, it is very easy to end up with many tabs in the background, unless I manually close them. I would like FF on Android to behave like it does on PC.

Paul
Paul
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Hi

I have had a look at this seems to be the same as the issue being discussed at:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20090

You are welcome to follow this and add comments.