philc / philc/vimium

[Bug] Vimium stops working after moving a tab into new window with W on Firefox on macOS

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Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
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Description

Describe the bug

Vimium stops working after moving a tab into new window with W on Firefox on macOS.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Start with https://news.google.com as an example, as you can scroll down on this page to test if Vimium is working or not.
  2. Press W to move the tab into a new window.
  3. In the new window with the Google news page, Vimium stops to any keyboard commands, for example, j to scroll down, or f for link jumps.
  4. However, if you do something else with the browser, e.g., press cmd + T to create a new tab, and press cmd + W to close it to go back to the Google news page, then Vimium will resume to respond to keyboard commands like j for scroll down.

Browser and Vimium version

As shown in Firefox's about:support and about:addons pages:

Key Value
Name Firefox
Version 150.0.1
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:150.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/150.0
OS Darwin 24.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 24.6.0: Fri Feb 27 19:34:59 PST 2026; root:xnu-11417.140.69.709.8~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T6041
Vimium Version 2.4.2
Vimium Last Updated on May 2, 2026

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the issue in Firefox on macOS by moving a tab with W into a new window, then test j and f before and after opening and closing another tab. Trace the browser-extension lifecycle around the new window and determine what must be restored so Vimium responds immediately after the move; verify the same commands work without the workaround.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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