Each SE site has tabs as a second level of navigation, for example below the "Questions" top-level navigation there are the "newest", "featured", "frequent", "votes", "active" and "unanswered" tabs.
The tabs I mentioned are stickly, so if you at some point sort the questions according to votes, all questions lists you look at later will be sorted according to votes as well, even if you're looking at different tags. You have to actively select a different tab to change the behaviour again.
There are three major reason why I consider the current behaviour problematic:
- The different options are not equal, I use almost always "newest" and only use the other ones very rarely. And when I use them, I pretty much always want to switch back to my default of "newest" immediately afterwards.
- The stickiness occasionally confuses users that don't notice that they're now on the featured tab and wonder why there are so few or no questions at all there.
- The behavior is inconsistent with the navigation in other parts of the site, the tabs below "Users" or "Badges" for example are not sticky.
I propose to change this and make those tabs non-sticky, but as this is a rather significant change to the navigation of the site I'm also interested in reasons why the current behaviour should be kept. I personally find it annoying, but there are a lot of different ways to use SE sites and I can imagine that some users rely on this behaviour.
