Paul McAuley Reporter
	Description • 14 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b7

The problem:

Panorama introduces the concept of a "tab group". This new concept is completely unnecessary and has many disadvantages, some of which include:
- Confuses users due to open pages/"tabs" being hidden from the user - the only way users can retrieve such hidden pages/"tabs" is through Panorama's proprietary interface.
- Confuses users in situations where multiple windows are open.
- Confuses users by blurring an open page and a bookmark.
- Confuses users with unnecessary extra hierarchy.
- Slow and clunky way to partition a set of pages/"tabs"
- Slow and clunky way to access a particular desired page/"tab" directly from the OS.
- Doesn't obey existing OS window management paradigms - "inner platform effect".

The solution:

Simply do away with the extra "tab group" hierarchy and use instead standard OS windows to group your pages/"tabs". This grouping by window can be performed by using the same excellent UI that Panorama has at present (complete with the same spatial "Panorama" view of your open Firefox groups/windows).

I made some mock-ups and a case study of exactly how this could work quite some time ago:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Broccauley/Fixing_TabCandy#The_.22Visualize_Pages.22_View_in_Mock-ups
( warning - verbose detail entailed! :) )

Reproducible: Always

	Kevin Hanes
	Comment 1 • 14 years ago

Interesting suggestion that sounds like it might touch tangentially on our "all windows" work, which we are reopening discussion on, post ff4.0. 

Putting into "future" as we won't get to something this major before ff4.0

	MZ (watervole02)
	Comment 2 • 14 years ago

What about users who don't like to group similar taskbar buttons. Won't this clutter up their taskbars?

	bobby.birks
	Comment 3 • 14 years ago

(In reply to comment #2)
> What about users who don't like to group similar taskbar buttons. Won't this
> clutter up their taskbars?

You raise a good point, MZ. At least for users who are taking advantage of Panorama to have a single-windowed browser experience! Personally, I've also avoided taskbar grouping, and even taking advantage of tabbed browsing it's common for me to have upwards of eight browser windows open at work and at home in Firefox 3.x

However, I found that even with Panorama and tab groups, I use multiple browser windows. In part for reasons like being able to easily Alt+Tab between them, the fact that having multiple windows gives me an easy and automatic chronology of my browsing, and so on.

I just don't feel that Panorama currently works well enough for people in the middle ground between a single browser window and a single tab group per window. Not to say there aren't people who appreciate how Panorama currently works. However, there are some issues, as noted in bug 578512.

I know I'm spilling into another issue, but bear with me a while. I think broccauley sums up the core of *this* issue nicely without getting into other topics. However, I'm not too far off topic, since issue 578512 is implicitly included in this one. (At least, it's hard to imagine we'd completely sacrifice Panorama's ability to display more than one tab group at a time for this.) So let me cover some of the issues that tie into this for anyone not familiar with them, to give a broader overview of what's in play here.

Unless one remembers or carefully manages their windows, how do they know where they started their random search for "jackanapes?" Right now, they must hunt for it or search for one of its tabs by name. In the latter case, since they're already throwing away the visual aspect of Panorama, why not just use the awesome bar to find that tab? For the user with multiple browser windows, they throw away a good amount of the utility Panorama has to offer, unless they're highly organized or conscientious about their browsing habits.

However, if Panorama is permitted to operate across all open browser windows, this introduces even more complexity and potential for confusion if a window houses multiple tab groups. Do we switch to whatever window the tab group was originally opened in? "Why did Firefox switch windows? And what happened to the window with my forums?" Perhaps we migrate that tab group to the current window instead? "Why did that tab group hide my e-mail? I originally opened it in a different window!"

I think there's no clear expectation of *how* Firefox should behave in these scenarios, which means dissatisfied users. Either option is perfectly valid, and users are perfectly justified in assuming either behavior. Worse, until they educate themselves or spot the pattern, they're justified in assuming *both* behaviors by means of expecting whatever would be most convenient to them at the time. There really is no right answer.

Which brings me to my points. Tab groups and Panorama only offer the potential to reduce taskbar clutter *if* Panorama works well enough to permit them to consolidate windows. For reasons noted above, I believe Panorama in its current state is (for at least some users) *not* sufficient for anything less than total consolidation to a single window. And *if* those limitations are overcome, then it introduces new problems with usability and predictability which may be mitigated or negated by using OS windows.

The middle ground between a single-window experience and a tab-group-per-window experience is wrought with potential for complexity and frustration. I believe we'll ultimately have to enforce one extreme or the other to achieve the greatest level of satisfaction in the user base. Unfortunately, limiting everyone to a single window takes away a great deal of their ability to interact with Firefox as they would any other application on their operating system, and is likely to be more poorly received than taskbar clutter to which users have generally already grown accustomed. At best, I expect consideration for a single-windowed browsing experience would be pursued as a user-level option.

Based on all that and adding broccauley's concerns, to me at least this feature seems like it makes more sense than the alternatives, despite some of its own consequences. If you follow the outstanding issues, one by one, it seems like this would be the ultimate consequence, with optional support for single-window browsing if there was enough demand for it.

	Ian Stirling.
	Comment 4 • 14 years ago

What should happen is that the browser does what the user wants. However - in the absence of mind-reading hardware, the following thoughts occur.

Single window browsing, and multi-window browsing both have issues.

For a multi-window solution, I imagine something like this:
You open panorama.

You are presented with a set of tab groups.

Some of these are in the same window, some are in different windows.

The ones in the same window look as they do now.
The ones in different windows have the titlebar of the tab group decorated to look like an OS window. (or some other signifier)

This gets slightly more complex when you have more tabs than will easily fit on screen.

A way round this would be groups of tab groups.


You have three windows.
'Home' 'Work' 'Play'

You are in the home window, and open Panorama.
The home window tab groups pop up. (Say 'Furniture', 'Cooking', ...)
Tab groups of 'Work' and 'Play also appear, decorated as OS windows (or some other signifier).

You have just opened a new tab, and you realise it's in the wrong place.
You drag it from the current 'active' tab group to the subgroup 'Projects' in the 'Work' tab group group.


Issues remain of course.
Terminology. I will refer to groups of tabs as clusters from now on.

Does clicking on the 'work' cluster expand it, and clusterify the 'Home' windows groups?

Does doing this switch windows?

How do you move a tab from a cluster into an expanded group?

Rationale:
Both the pure single-window case, and the multi-window and seperate panoramas lose something.

The single window case loses all of the OSs window managment that some users may find valuable.
They can't now go from 'Home' to 'Work' windows with one click, if they're reading email, or looking at a spreadsheet, or ...
They have to click the firefox window, then select panorama, then select the right group.

The multi-window case with disparate panoramas loses much of panoramas utility - there is no easy way to drag stuff between windows, amongst other issues.

Is there a way round this, that allows users that want single window, and ones that want multi-window to be happy?

	Conley Read
	Comment 5 • 14 years ago

The Panorama feature is a welcome change to the way we work with tabs, but i don't understand why it breaks with the current Firefox paradigm of being able to move tabs between windows!

I'm not sure that the conversation needs to be as philosophical as it started at the beginning of this bug, it seems simple...

Panorama should allow tabs and groups to be dragged between Panoramas.

This is a usability bug in Panorama.

	Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)
	Comment 6 • 13 years ago

As Kevin Hanes points out, the confusing relationship between Panorama's tab groups and a user's actual windows is an artifact of us not accomplishing all we wanted to in Panorama for Firefox 4.0.  Our eventual goal is for Panorama's "groups" to have a 1-to-1 relationship with a user's windows.  Even more importantly than a confusion of terms, this will eliminate the current problem of tab groups being "lost" inside Panorama once a user starts using Panorama.  Panorama should never hide a user's content, but rather provide a way to navigate the visible content in Firefox.

	Ian Gilman [:iangilman]
	Comment 7 • 13 years ago

Jennifer, 

Our (as yet unfulfilled) intention was for every window to be represented by a tab group, true, but not every tab group's window need be visible on the screen. If we require that every tab group be an open window on the screen, we defeat the clutter-reducing point of Panorama.