Saved tabs menu bookmark brings Safari window to unusable state
Saved tabs menu bookmark does not ask for user confirmation when navigating away from many tabs, and when the user returns to the previous set of tabs (note that this possibility isn't clear to the user), the entire Safari window reaches an unusable state.
I have a saved tabs folder as a bookmark item that is also present on the bookmarks menu bar. That means if I accidentally click on the saved tabs link instead of the address bar then my Safari session with all of the current active tabs disappears! I'd like to suggest that Safari presents a confirmation page when the user is about to change the state of more than one tab, just like it would ask for confirmation if the user were to exit Safari or close a window with many open tabs. By clicking on that single button nearby to the address bar, the entire window state is altered, not just the current tab. That's not my initial expected behaviour. On the other hand, it was also not clear to me initially that I could navigate back to the previous set of tabs when that state is comprehensively changed. So maybe the user can be informed about the ability to undo that action. For now, I will certainly be moving that set of tabs away from the menu bar, tucked further within the Bookmarks menu. But the problem that I have now is more than just a temporary unavailability of the old state.
When I accidentally navigated forward to that set of tabs, and subsequently quickly hit the back arrow button to revert to the previous state, Safari itself reached a point where the content of all tabs became unavailable. This sounds like it could be a kind of race condition where Safari needs to throw away cached information for the old set of tabs before it builds new cached information upon loading all new tabs. By aborting the process of loading those new tabs, maybe Safari assumes that the set of tabs is up to date, but the transition back to the old set of tabs doesn't appropriately trigger a reload and revert of the state. In any case the symptom is clear. When I switch between tabs in the problematic window, I continue to get completely blank screens even though I had many distinct tabs open in that window initially. It seems that to reproduce this problem what needs to be done is to have this set of saved tabs in a bookmark that is stored just below the address bar, and then to quickly navigate backward to return to the previous state. The more tabs in the current and stored session, the more this process may bog down Safari and expose this type of race condition. I also believe I may have also double or triple clicked that saved tabs button, which may invalidate the original set of tabs since the state for several sets of tabs might not be stored transparently by default. In any case I would like to recommend that Safari warn the user when this step takes place. The user could even be warned because they place a set of tabs bookmark below the menu bar, since they might accidentally click there. When this problem occurred, the other Safari window I had open had multiple tabs but this part of the Safari session was considered still working and the symptoms were not there. Yet the problematic window continues to experience the problem where all tabs are currently blank. I believe that I'll have to restart Safari to trigger the reloading of the pages, but I don't even know if that will be sufficient. I hope that this information is helpful.
I have a saved tabs folder as a bookmark item that is also present on the bookmarks menu bar. That means if I accidentally click on the saved tabs link instead of the address bar then my Safari session with all of the current active tabs disappears! I'd like to suggest that Safari presents a confirmation page when the user is about to change the state of more than one tab, just like it would ask for confirmation if the user were to exit Safari or close a window with many open tabs. By clicking on that single button nearby to the address bar, the entire window state is altered, not just the current tab. That's not my initial expected behaviour. On the other hand, it was also not clear to me initially that I could navigate back to the previous set of tabs when that state is comprehensively changed. So maybe the user can be informed about the ability to undo that action. For now, I will certainly be moving that set of tabs away from the menu bar, tucked further within the Bookmarks menu. But the problem that I have now is more than just a temporary unavailability of the old state.
When I accidentally navigated forward to that set of tabs, and subsequently quickly hit the back arrow button to revert to the previous state, Safari itself reached a point where the content of all tabs became unavailable. This sounds like it could be a kind of race condition where Safari needs to throw away cached information for the old set of tabs before it builds new cached information upon loading all new tabs. By aborting the process of loading those new tabs, maybe Safari assumes that the set of tabs is up to date, but the transition back to the old set of tabs doesn't appropriately trigger a reload and revert of the state. In any case the symptom is clear. When I switch between tabs in the problematic window, I continue to get completely blank screens even though I had many distinct tabs open in that window initially. It seems that to reproduce this problem what needs to be done is to have this set of saved tabs in a bookmark that is stored just below the address bar, and then to quickly navigate backward to return to the previous state. The more tabs in the current and stored session, the more this process may bog down Safari and expose this type of race condition. I also believe I may have also double or triple clicked that saved tabs button, which may invalidate the original set of tabs since the state for several sets of tabs might not be stored transparently by default. In any case I would like to recommend that Safari warn the user when this step takes place. The user could even be warned because they place a set of tabs bookmark below the menu bar, since they might accidentally click there. When this problem occurred, the other Safari window I had open had multiple tabs but this part of the Safari session was considered still working and the symptoms were not there. Yet the problematic window continues to experience the problem where all tabs are currently blank. I believe that I'll have to restart Safari to trigger the reloading of the pages, but I don't even know if that will be sufficient. I hope that this information is helpful.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
