[Bug] Vimium stops working after moving a tab into new window with W on Firefox on macOS
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Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- JavaScript
- Stars
- 27k
- Forks
- 2.6k
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
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:
- 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.
- Press
Wto move the tab into a new window. - In the new window with the Google news page, Vimium stops to any keyboard commands, for example,
jto scroll down, orffor link jumps. - 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
jfor 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
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- 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