631385 - Have a generic "tab not loaded/tab loading" thumbnail for Panorama

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect, P3)

Description

[Kevin Hanes]

When we first load Panorama and we don't have a cached image tile for a tab, we should come up with a less jarring default image tile instead of showing white tabs. This image should convey that the tab is still loading.

Comment 1

[Kevin Hanes]

Assigned to Faaborg for design

Comment 2

[Sean Dunn]

I envision this as something that feels less harsh than a white canvas, since in my opinion that feels like something is missing, or broken, with no expectation of it changing. Maybe a Cyclon throbber on the bottom that's out of the way, but says "I'm processing". (I'm no designer).

Comment 3

[Sean Dunn]

er.. Cylon.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Unless you keep the frame rate really low, animated images can be surprisingly expensive. See bug 595671 for instance. You probably don't want that at this stage.

Comment 5

[Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine [:mitcho]]

I also would warn against a "throbber" or "loading" image... if the user's using bartab functionality, it actually just sets up a false expectation that the thumbnail will load on its own given enough time.

Assigning to the "near future" bin.

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

I'm fine with using a white page for now.  The concern I have with throbbers (at least the apngs we currently have) is that it will be very visually noisy if you are seeing many of them at the same time.  So some sort of very light sort of watermark throbber in the center of a blank page would probably work best.  Not overwhelming, but enough to provide continual feedback.

Comment 7

[Kevin Hanes]

I'm not sold on any kind of throbber, I'd be cleaner to have a generic image file.

Comment 8

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Yeah that would be fine as well, what's the roughly estimated time for the thumbnail images showing up (just a few seconds, right?)

Comment 9

[Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine [:mitcho]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Yeah that would be fine as well, what's the roughly estimated time for the
> thumbnail images showing up (just a few seconds, right?)

Can easily be more than a few seconds (bug 631869), and that's with bartab functionality off. As noted in comment 5, if the user's set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs = 0, the other tabs will *never* update their thumbs until they're clicked on and loaded.

Comment 10

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Right, in that case we definitely do not want to do any kind of animation.

Comment 11

[Kevin Hanes]

So is this a Faaborg bug or a Shorlander bug? Either way I imagine it's not on the Fx4 timeline.

Comment 12

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

over to shorlander for creating the icon.

Comment 13

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

title changed as was discussed in Bug 633697

Comment 14

[Kevin Hanes]

bugspam

Comment 15

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

bugspam

Comment 16

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

bugspam

Comment 17

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

bugspam

(Fx7 was branched, removing open bugs from Fx7 meta bug, we won't create new meta bugs for upcoming Fx versions)

Comment 18

[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.