632222 - Do the initial TabItem creation in chunks

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect)

Comment 1

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

Looks like with bug 631747 we can load over 500 tabs on a slow machine without hitting the "unresponsive script" dialog, and maybe at that point we should be looking for other UI metaphors than representing each tab as a thumbnail on the screen, so maybe this bug is irrelevant. But, for future consideration: 

Creating the individual TabItems is the slowest part of start-up, and the UI basically locks up while we're doing it. Obviously it would be nice to make it faster, but baring that, we can at least break it up into multiple chunks, so the UI remains responsive and the user never gets an "unresponsive script" dialog.

As I said in bug 588630, we have a couple of options: 

* Break the UI.init function into a series of routines that are chained
together via setTimeout. If we do this, we'll need to make sure all of our
event handlers are added at the end, so we don't start taking input (either
from the user or from the browser) until we're all set up.

* Identify the heaviest operations and defer them until later. For instance, if
setting up the thumbnails is taking most of the time, we can defer that but
otherwise set everything up in one shot. If we do this, we'll have to make sure
the defered item isn't used until it's set up.

Comment 2

[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.