Return to Previous Position after Scroll to Top

[talkaboom]

Opera recently added some features with their "new" browser. As primarily a Vivaldi user (with Opera only when i need the VPN and sync), there is one feature I often end up trying to use before realising I am on the wrong browser.

Opera advertises the new feature with this -
"Need to return to the top of the page but don't want to lose your current spot? Click on the tab to jump to the top, click again to return exactly where you were before"

Replace the parts in italics with any shortcut or gesture you like. The bold part is what I would absolutely love to see in Vivaldi.

The option to Scroll to top AND back with a simple shortcut has changed the way I browse. In combination with extensions like "AutoPagerize", this feature lets you navigate on sites like Reddit and Twitter with ease. Moreover, many websites do not have a scroll to top button and none I know of give the option to return to your previous point. I realise that gestures and shortcuts to scroll to top already exist and the scroll bar can return you to the approximate location. Even so, this would still be a great feature to have in our favorite browser.

Thank you for your consideration.

Edit: English - Hard! Made changes for clarity.

[Christoph142]

Try modern scroll. It offers this functionality.

[Guilimote]

I agree this is a quite smart feature, but it would conflict with the one already implemented in Vivaldi if you enable the option: "Minimize active tab" (which allows clicking current tab to display previous tab)

And I love this one even more! The main advantage is that if you want to compare two tabs by displaying one, then the other, then back to the first one, you don't have to move the mouse. You click the current tab --> back to previous tab, you re-click the same tab without moving the mouse --> back to the initial tab.
And this one can not be done in an other way than clicking on the current tab, because the whole purpose is to avoid moving the mouse when you re-click it again.

So I prefer "scrolling to the top" assigned to something else (like a mouse gesture "UP", for example).

It could also be an option though, by choosing between this and the current "Minimize active tab". But please don't remove the "Minimize" feature!

[talkaboom]

@guilimote I do use the minimise feature occasionally, now that I think about it. Perhaps an option to use something like alt-click to enable the scroll feature would work?

Back to top is not the biggest problem. Ctrl-Home is what I usually use. However, the ability to go back to where you were instantly is incredibly useful.

[Pesala]

@talkaboom I use GestureLeft and GestureRight. These are even more efficient than clicking on the tab as you do not first need to move the mouse cursor to the tab.

I use keyboard shortcuts Home and End for scroll to page top and scroll to page bottom.

[talkaboom]

@pesala Yes, but you can set gestures or use shortcuts for scrolling to top or the bottom. Not to return to your previous point after scrolling to top. As far as I know, no browser apart from opera has this function.

An example of the use of this feature:
Suppose you just searched for some trending hastag(s) on twitter. As you scroll down reading the various tweets, new ones will be made. You can Ctrl-home (or use gestures, as you prefer) to go to top and load the new tweets. However, there is no easy way to get back to what you were aside from scrolling to the approximate location and hoping to find something you remember reading.

[Seasonly]

The click for tab should be a parameter also like gesture or rocker gestures. Some use it as getting the last tab, others for getting top of the page, and we can imagine new solutions activates with click like quick tiling.

About me, I tried the opera new feature but I still prefer to use gestures which allows you to get your focus over the page instead of getting UI stuffs. I use double top (up down up) or double down gestures.

[Pesala]

@talkaboom

• Go to this page
• Scroll down, e.g. to Web Panels
• GestureLeft or RockerGesture Left to go back
• GestureRight or RockerGesture Right to go forward

You should find yourself back at your previous place. If, you follow links to anchors on the page, it is even more reliable.

[talkaboom]

I should have phrased the entire thing better. People seem to be suggesting and talking about what gestures or clicks they use rather than what I intended to convey.

Opera advertises the new feature with this -
"Need to return to the top of the page but don't want to lose your current spot? Click on the tab to jump to the top, click again to return exactly where you were before"

Replace the parts in italics with any shortcut or gesture you like. The bold part is what I would absolutely love to see in Vivaldi.

[talkaboom]

@pesala Sorry, you reply came while I was still typing the above.

The steps you suggesting work because we essentially click on a hyperlink. If you are just scrolling down a page, you cannot return to the exact spot with a "go back" gesture or shortcut (backspace by default for all browsers/file managers).

[Pesala]

@talkaboom If you click the above link, scroll down, than go back, you will return to this page. Going forward will then return you to the position to which you scrolled.

I agree with @Guilimote that this feature is good, but I am pointing out other methods that can already be used to navigate in a similar way.

[talkaboom]

@pesala said in Click on Tab to Scroll to Top and Back:

If you click the above link, scroll down, than go back, you will return to this page. Going forward will then return you to the position to which you scrolled.

The idea is to scroll to the top of a page, with or without in-page hyperlinks, and then return the the location you had scrolled up from (without ever leaving the page). "Back"ing to a previous page to return to the same point on a page you were already on is not what I intended.

[Seasonly]

@talkaboom

"return exactly where you were before"

Yes, finaly I understand and I like this. I think the title and the first message should be rephrase to get this in foreground. But this feature could be considered as interesting as selected-tab click as for gestures.
In my case, that means that when I reach the top of page with the gesture of my own, another some same gesture call whereas I'm of the top of the page and then, I get back to the middle of the page where I left when i decided to go the top of the page.
Personnaly I see this like an improvment of the gesture top/down page. For this I vote so.

[becm]

@pesala if we are talking about ways how to (badly) emulate this feature the workflow:
duplicate tab → scroll to top → close duplicated tab
seems to be the closest we can get for the moment.

To implement this it would suffice to save a marker in the page on go to top|bottom|position as it is done when navigating away via history or link and supply an operation to recall that position on a site.

The shoutcut Ctrl+Home is already a builtin (unset in key bindings) duplicate of Home (also not reflected in key binding settings) and could be used by default.
If the initial marker is set to page top there would be little difference in workflow, the markers on repeated operations would swap between read position and page top.

Funny side note: @talkaboom picked the hardest use cases for this feature, since the saved position is difficult to restore on sites with reflow operations on page top.

[Seasonly]

You should even get out the click on tab words if you can ... and get also bold with any shortcut or gesture you like.

[dude99]

Wow, it took them so many years to implant what i requested in the ancient Opera forum...
Does the Opera dev still keep a log of the feature request from the pre v15 era? LOL

[luetage]

I wrote a mod with this functionality. You can try it here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/27856/tab-scroll

[Pesala]

Perhaps one way to implement this without breaking existing features like Minimise Active Tab would be by having a new command for Return to Previous Position.

Then users could assign a keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture to this command.

Vivaldi can already remember the previous position in sessions, so I don't see any barrier to doing this.

[luetage]

@pesala The feature request is not for a keyboard shortcut, mouse gesture, menu item, or command accessible through quick commands, it’s for clicking the tab to scroll to top of page and back to previous position. You could already implement this with a bookmarklet, user script or extension, if there wasn’t the requirement of clicking the tab.

[Pesala]

@luetage As I said:

Perhaps one way to implement this without breaking existing features ...