595583 - Add a method for viewing/managing sound in Panorama

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, enhancement)

Description

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

Currently it is difficult to get a global view of sound in the browser.  An <audio> or <video> element obviously lives within a particular document, and therefore a particular tab.  However, the experience of the sound these make goes beyond the tab metaphor: as a user I am confronted with any/all sound at once despite my current tab, and in order to manage it, I must be able to switch from my global experience of sounds to particular tabs.  The "which tab is making that sound" problem is well known, and universally despised.

I wonder if Panorama might provide a useful user abstraction for solving this.  If I can step back and see all my tabs at once, why not the sound I'm hearing?  This would require some way to display a sound, and a way to get from that sound to the tab making it (or at least a way to pause/play it).  I have no idea the right way to solve this.

I realize sound coming from Flash is not really in a tab (there is only 1 instance of Flash shared among many tabs).  This makes <audio> and <video> more compelling, since it becomes possible to control them with more precision (i.e., I might actually want a song playing in one tab while I watch a movie in another vs. a global on/off switch).

Panorama may or may not be the right target for this (I have some ideas about exposing back-end data from media elements so UI can provide hints for users).  But I thought I'd open the discussion for the post-Firefox 4 time frame.

Comment 1

[Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine [:mitcho]]

This is a great idea but I think it would be best done as an add-on. It's possible for an add-on to inject JS into the Panorama frame, get access to all the xul tabs associated with individual tab thumbnails, and add extra DOM elements to those tab thumbs. If you have any questions about how to do that, you can hit us up in #tabcandy. :)

Comment 3

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Panorama has been removed from Firefox 45, currently in Beta and scheduled for release on March 7th. As such, I'm closing all existing Panorama bugs.

If you are still using Panorama, you will see a deprecation message in Firefox 44, and when 45 is released your tab group data will be migrated to bookmarks, with a folder for each group. There are also a few addons offering similar functionality.

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal for more info.

We're removing Panorama because it has extremely low usage (about 0.01% of users), and has a large number of bugs and usability issues. The cost of fixing all those issues is far too high to justify, and so we'll instead be focusing our time and energy on improving other parts of Firefox.