657097 - Re-architect Panorama & tabbrowser integration so that detaching last tab in tab group can have intuitive UI

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect)

Description

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

While the user is dragging a tab, once the drag has exceeded the detach threshold, we want to show the tab will be detached and will no longer part of the window. The ideal UI then is to display the next tab that would become selected in the content area (e.g. by calling _blurTab). However, when detaching the last tab in a tab group, this is problematic, since there could be other hidden tab groups.

We want to show what will happen once the user drops the tab to detach it, but what will happen is that Tab Groups view will appear so that the user can select another group, but we can't do that, since then it makes it impossible for the user to cancel the detachment by dragging the tab back, since the tab bar is no longer visually there.

We also shouldn't display a blank tab bar and content area to the user, since that's not a useful preview of what will happen when the tab is released.

(The patch for bug 455694 simply hides the tab and not the content area when detaching to avoid this problem.)

I don't have an elegant solution for this at the time of filing.

I'll attach a video displaying the problem in the next week.

Comment 1

[Stephen Blakely]

If Panorama becomes global rather than per-window, as seems to be the goal, then could detaching the last tab simply hide the window as in Bug 672085? And then just stay gone? Then just dropping the tab anywhere except onto another Firefox window's tab bar would have essentially the same effect as dragging it back to the original window's tab bar. I see how this would be a problem with the current implementation of Panorama, but when/if it becomes global then you wouldn't have the problem of losing tab groups if the window was closed.