581038 - Should we be using an existing thumbnailing system from elsewhere in Firefox?

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 60469

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect, P4)

Description

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

I believe windows 7 tab previews and ctrl-tab tab previews already create/update and store thumbnails on each xul:tab item as __thumbnail. Tabcandy probably shouldn't duplicate the effort.. especially if it's doing it like bug 580954.

I believe there was a concern that the existing thumbnails were too low resolution?

Comment 1

[Aza Raskin [:aza]]

Don't the existing thumbnails update themselves re: their resolution over time? That is, if you make the thumbnail bigger it should after a little bit become higher resolution.

Comment 2

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

I think in the above comments, Mardak is using the term "existing thumbnails" to refer to the Windows 7 tab previews, and Aza is using the same term to refer to the Tab Candy generated thumbnails. 

At any rate, if there are thumbnails of a suitable size that update frequently enough, available on all platforms, we certainly should use them. 

How would we find out about such a thing? I believe there was talk at some point about creating a general thumbnail service in the browser... don't know if anything's happened with that.

Comment 3

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

Note that there are some suggestions for places to grab thumbnails in the comment thread for bug 580954.

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

Mass moving all Tab Candy bugs from Mozilla Labs to Firefox::Tab Candy.  Filter the bugmail spam with "tabcandymassmove".

Comment 5

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

Editing summary to triage later.

Comment 6

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

Recent conversation in IRC: 

dietrich: iangilman, seandunn: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497543
firebot: Bug 497543 nor, --, ---, nobody, NEW, Provide a thumbnail service
dietrich: the first patch is a super basic thumbnail caching js module, that uses the cache service for storage
dietrich: the second patch is an xpcom component that provides a url scheme for loading images from that cache
dietrich: i'm not sure if the second patch is the right approach. there's probably a way to do it directly from the cache
dietrich: maybe
dietrich: but it makes it so you can just do moz-thumb://yoururlhere, and put that in a src attr, or whatever
dietrich: or you could use some identifier, if you have unique ids for the tabs
dietrich: panorama-thumb://tabId
dietrich: i like the general purpose thumbnail service, since all add-ons could use it, etc
dietrich: but not really necessary just to solve this problem
iangilman: yeah, I don't know that we're ready to take on the whole show

Comment 7

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

bugspam: returning Sean's bugs to the pool

Comment 8

[Raymond Lee [:raymondlee]]

Bug 604699 has landed.  Thumbnails are stored in the browser's image cache rather than in sessionstore.  Shall we make this as fixed?

Comment 9

[Kevin Hanes]

Yup, I suppose that would even make it a dupe.