999895 - Improve Panorama to become a major feature of Firefox across all devices. [in-depth concept/idea]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect)

Description

[rexyrexy2]

This is my idea of how Panorama could work if fleshed out into a major feature of Firefox. When you open multiple windows, the panorama icon shows up. This is because every window is a tab group. Clicking a window in tab groups would close tab groups (with the transition) and put the focus on the window that contains the group. Private tab groups would be in the private window purple color to distinguish them (or would have the private browsing mask-logo-thing next to title). When you would close a window, it would ask you whether you want to close the tabs, cancel, or a third option to save them as a tab group.

In android, there would be a tab groups feature as well. On the tab manager, there would be an icon to enter tab groups next to the two private browsing/normal browsing things already present, and mobile would have a "visible group", which would be the group that shows up on the main interface, and the private browsing feature could stay the same. (as in the groups would not affect it on mobile) The tab groups would cover the entire screen like in current Firefox, but would be more mobile-optimized. If data synchronization was enabled, then the "primary tab groups" can be edited from desktop as well. (but they will essentially be pointless unless you use a mobile device).

In regards to the mobile optimization, after you have your finger on a tab for a little bit, you will be able to move it, and you could short tap a tab to open it. The UI would scale/change based off the device size, so really small screens would get a thing where you can show two groups on-screen at once, and the bigger the screen is, the more groups can be on-screen at once. There would have to be a balance between the icon size and number of groups on-screen at once to make the UI fit your device.

Moving your finger around the screen without holding first would let you scroll between that tab group to show tabs that are not currently visible. There would be both the main tab groups icon, and a zoom in/out icon. The zoomed-in view would let you manage all of your tabs, while the zoomed out view would let you see as many groups as feasible on your screen without being able to edit them, but still being able to drag them around and see their titles/tabs in them. (which would make it easier to choose which ones you want to edit)

With sync enabled, there would also be icons in mobile to show which tab groups are windows on desktop, and will have some sort of way to set it as a window as desktop and un-set it.

The first time you open a new window in desktop, (after the update) there would be some sort of tooltip-type thing pointing towards the tab groups (or whatever name it gets) icon to make the user aware of it's presence, saying something like "This is where you manage all of your tabs". This alert would also show up if you already had multiple windows open after installing the update, and people who already use tab groups will have a slightly different alert telling them tab groups has been improved.

I believe I covered all of the major points... That took a while to write and come up with, so I hope you consider it. The mobile plan might need some tweaking, but that is just a basic plan to make tab groups work on mobile, and I have the suggestion of not having all on-screen at once because obviously if you were to put them all on a tablet or phone screen, it would NOT be easy to use on a touch screen if you have a larger amount of tabs...

This would make Panorama from a small feature in desktop into a considerably large feature for all versions, and a way to access ALL of your tabs from both mobile and desktop.

Comment 1

[rexyrexy2]

Also, there would of course be an official Tab Groups API for extensions, so extensions can easily use tab groups.

There would also be a menu similar to what the "TabGroups Menu" extension added integrated into Firefox, so people would be able to use a menu to access and switch groups quicker, if desired. (the menu would just switch current group/tab) The tab groups would be one of those double buttons that are both a cascading menu and click-able. If clicked, they would open the tab group in the current window with the last opened tab in it. if opened, they would show a list of the tabs in the group the menu came from. If a group was currently open in a window, it would still show on the menu, but it would be "locked", on the menu, so you would not be able to open it or its menu.

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.