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feat: Add Air Traffic Control for automatic link routing to workspaces, b=no-bug, c=workspaces #9042

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@meenie meenie commented Jun 16, 2025

Air Traffic Control – Automatic External-Link Routing

I’ve been itching to move from Arc Browser to Zen for daily work, but I couldn’t live without Arc’s Air Traffic Control feature, so I decided to add it to Zen.
This is my very first contribution to the project, so please excuse any mistakes.


What’s inside ?

Area File(s) Purpose
Core engine src/zen/modules/ZenAirTrafficControl.mjs Stores routing rules, persists them to prefs, and decides which workspace a URL belongs in.
Browser glue src/zen/modules/ZenAirTrafficControlIntegration.mjs Hooks BrowserDOMWindow.openURI, asks the engine, then opens/relocates the tab in the right workspace.
Preferences UI browser/components/preferences/zen-air-traffic-control.{xhtml,js,css} Lets users add / edit / disable rules from Settings.

How it works

  1. Rule definition
    Users will create patterns (e.g. *.github.com, */jira/*) in the Preferences UI.
  2. Engine decision
    ZenAirTrafficControl.routeURL() returns { workspaceId } when a rule matches.
  3. Tab handling
    The integration layer intercepts the external open, creates the tab, and moves it to the workspace – all in the same window, so no flash-of-new-window.

Performance note – the integration keeps a small “duplicate-URL” throttle to avoid processing the same link twice in a second.


Screenshots

Main interface. I added it to the Tab Management section of Preferences
image

When importing, you can map routes from one workspace to another.
image


Missing Things

Localization (l10n)

Localized strings are not yet wired up; I'm actually not sure how that process works.

Documentation

I'll create a PR in https://github.com/zen-browser/docs if/when this PR is merged.

@meenie meenie requested a review from mr-cheffy June 16, 2025 06:00
@dosubot dosubot bot added size:XXL This PR changes 1000+ lines, ignoring generated files. Feature labels Jun 16, 2025
@meenie meenie force-pushed the add-air-traffic-control branch 2 times, most recently from 6a7066b to ff9e5de Compare June 16, 2025 06:08
@meenie meenie force-pushed the add-air-traffic-control branch from ff9e5de to b8ca114 Compare June 16, 2025 07:44
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It all looks pretty awesome!

Only thing im requesting is; please move all the settings into dialogs on the top window as we are trying to move away from it.

So, for example, create a dialog to manage all the rules and once done just remove it from the DOM, that should be enough.

And please run npm run pretty for format the project

Looks really cool, cant wait to use it myself!

content/browser/preferences/widgets/setting-control.mjs (widgets/setting-control/setting-control.mjs)
content/browser/preferences/widgets/setting-group.mjs (widgets/setting-group/setting-group.mjs)
content/browser/preferences/widgets/setting-group.css (widgets/setting-group/setting-group.css)
+
+ content/browser/preferences/zen-settings.js
+ content/browser/preferences/zen-air-traffic-control.js
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Could we please have all these settings in the parent window as a dialog? Trying to avoid the preferences page as much as possible.

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I think a need a little bit more clarity. Where should I put the affordance that would open up the dialog? Do you have an example where you've already done this in Zen?

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@meenie unfortunately, I can't think of an example where we are currently doing this on zen.

But it would ideally just be the same XHTML contents but instead of being in the settings, it's opened via https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/browser.js#5250.

One example of this modal is when pressing CMD+Q on mac

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Ya, for sure, makes sense. Just wondering where I should put the button to open it up? Should it be in a context menu somewhere? Or put a button in the preferences area that opens it up, kinda like how Arc does it themselves?
image

image

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Maybe here? @marat0n

image

Also, please ping me so I can know you wrote me

@meenie meenie force-pushed the add-air-traffic-control branch from 153b5f8 to 4a1216d Compare June 16, 2025 17:09
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meenie commented Jun 16, 2025

BTW, @mauro-balades, there's a bug with the tests where I'm getting FAIL A promise chain failed to handle a rejection: [fluent] Missing message in locale en-US: category-zen-marketplace - stack: (No stack available.). There's a missing translation for a tooltip. To get past that, I hacked that xhtml file to use a different translation. I tried manually adding one to the en-US fluent file but it didn't seem to work. Need some guidance what I should do.

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Should be just a warning, no?

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meenie commented Jun 16, 2025

Should be just a warning, no?

It actually fails the run. For example:
image

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ghost commented Jun 16, 2025

@meenie in that case, if you are going to make a PR for l10n packs, also add this one 🙏🏽

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@meenie how is it going? Need help with anything?

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meenie commented Jun 22, 2025

@mr-cheffy, sorry, work has been busy :). I'll try and finish this up to today. I see you pinged another person asking about adding the affordance to open up the ATC model in the context menu but haven't heard back yet. I'll go ahead and make the change as it's pretty easy to change again.

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Oh.. I misread the names 😅

Thanks a lot for such incredible amounts of patience and a great feature being introduced

@A2va
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A2va commented Jun 22, 2025

Just a quick question, are there any plans to implement synchronization (as with workspaces) in this PR? Or will it be done in another PR?
In any case, thanks for adding this feature.

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In a separate pr imo would be better. Also, @meenie could we please call it 'Control Flow'? You know.. in order to not have the same names

@itsyaasir
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Nice, that this is coming as a native feature, I specifically developed an extension for this found here.

Good work!

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Propheticus commented Jun 27, 2025

Just a quick check: what happens when an external link is routed to a workspace with default container A, but within Zen links to that domain have been configured to open in container B (e.g. using the widely used Firefox multi-account containers extension) ?
especially combined with this option:
image

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meenie commented Jun 27, 2025

@Propheticus, that is a very good question... I don't normally use Firefox so I wasn't aware of this. I will look into it!

Sorry all for the delay. My regular work has been rather all-consuming. I plan on finishing this up this weekend!

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