Chris Lee (:cleer) Reporter
	Description • 12 years ago

The current implementation of Panorama is over-complicated in its ability to create groups of various sizes and rearrange them. We want to remake Panorama to use an automatically organized, grid-based layout: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design-specs/images/Australis-i01-DesignSpec-MainWindow-%28Panorama%29-02.jpg

	u428464
	Comment 1 • 12 years ago

There is a lot of work to be done on Panorama and the discoverability should be greatly improved too considering the latest research that prove the feature isn't much used. Some of the improvements to be done :
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Improve_Panorama_interactions
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Panorama_All_Windows_UI
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Panorama_Synchronization
and Bug 596017.

But this redesign is a good start.

	Chris Lee (:cleer) Reporter
	Comment 2 • 12 years ago

Would like some feedback, especially on the sizing of everything. Currently the general idea is that there is a maximum of three groups per row and the groups on each row resize to take up the available space in the row. When the groups become sufficiently small, they stop resizing and instead the page scrolls.

The pages within each group are currently set to resize to accommodate a 3x2 scheme. One question is whether the pages should be sized, like the groups, to take up the maximum amount of space. The possible reasons not to are (1) this would eliminate whitespace and introduce a lot of differently sized thumbnails and (2) it's seemingly programatically difficult, requiring an iteration through each group and potentially even the pages within the group, which may be quite slow and unusable at large numbers of groups.

I'd also like to get feedback on the placement/sizing of UI controls: the add group button and the search bar.

	Girish Sharma [:Optimizer]
	Comment 3 • 12 years ago

This prototype looks good. Can I suggest a couple of things though :
1) When there is an already present empty group, don't create a new group and focus that one.
2) A group takes full width if its number is (max number of groups in one row)*i + 1, you should avoid this and have at least one already present group is the last row, which will mean that second last row has one less group that other rows.
3) The search bar should be placed up rather than down. It will be then consistent with the erst of the search bars (as per mockups)

	Daniel
	Comment 4 • 12 years ago

Looks good and I think the approach with a maximum of three columns works really well (at least for sane amount of groups). One thing could be improved however. If you have seven groups they are currently in rows of 3 + 3 + 1. I would suggest that we try to keep them as equally sized as possible and hence arrange them as 3 + 2 + 2. This applies if you have 10, 13 etc groups as well.

I think resizing the pages within each group is necessary. I frequently have more than six tabs open in a group and currently the group overflows at that point. Resizing them individually would fit more pages without making a group with say two pages in look ridiculous.

In this prototype pages disappear completely if a group overflows, which also needs a solution.

	Chris Lee (:cleer) Reporter
	Comment 5 • 12 years ago

This prototype has page resizing. Better or worse than prototype 2?

(don't look at the code; it's absolutely atrocious)

	Chris Lee (:cleer) Reporter
	Comment 6 • 12 years ago

I created an add-on-based prototype that displays user tab groups here: https://github.com/cleercode/panorama

Unfortunately, beyond that, there honestly doesn't seem like much promise for further development at this point. Hopefully someone else can pick it up.

	michael.gliwinski
	Comment 7 • 9 years ago

Why not keep it simple and allow users decide on the size of the grid by adding columns/rows?  Buttons to add column, add row and scale the grid would probably be enough and allow much flexibility.

E.g. for me 3 columns is not enough, I have a lot of screen estate horizontally and probably way too many tabs and groups than I should, I mostly use group names instead of thumbnails to find what I'm looking for.

The only problem I have right now with Panorama is that the groups can be all over the place and it's not possible to control their "size" and placement all together.

	Justin Dolske [:Dolske]
	Comment 8 • 8 years ago

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.