Firefox 4's Panorama feature is misguided
Jan. 15th, 2011 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwiceSo after using it on and off for a few months, I think I'm ready to call Firefox's "Panorama" feature a failure. It does interesting things, some of which are awesome, but it amounts to turning Firefox into a completely separate OS with its own window manager, running cordoned-off in its own little virtual machine.
Which is just a godawful idea regardless of implementation, but I can't even call the implementation good:
So okay, the underlying problem is that past a certain number of tabs, you'll want to split them into groups. Cool. We have a partial solution that has some problems, which is to split tabs into multiple windows. Also cool! I don't think it follows that the way forward is to forget windows exist and then create a new pseudo-window construct that's completely opaque to all the normal tools we have for managing window-like constructs. The only way that makes sense is in a ChromeOS-type situation, where a single window IS the entire operating system. I want Firefox to be an application, not a guest operating system; a citizen, not a resident alien.
And it's annoying that, for all that, it's so close. If you could invoke one unified full-screen Panorama view whose tab groups represented each open Firefox window, that would do the trick. Keep all the cool stuff about Panorama, but apply it to windows instead of some new like-a-window-but-shittier construct.
Which is just a godawful idea regardless of implementation, but I can't even call the implementation good:
- Not only do the operating system's normal window management controls have no way to interact with the window-like tab groups, but tab groups can't interact with each other beyond the boundary of the current window! You can't drag a tab from a tab group to another window's tab group; you can't drag a tab group between windows. It's like each Firefox window is its own OS instance with no knowledge of the others, which just makes no sense.
- Tab groups aren't exposed anywhere in the application's menu structure or window design. It would make sense to show them as children of the list of windows in the "Windows" menu, and to have each window show a representation of its available tab groups somewhere, but the only point where tab groups interface with the rest of the application is the trigger button, whose greyscale value shifts a bit if more than one tab group is present. So the state of tab groups is totally opaque until you trigger the view, which means it feels like a hidden feature. And not in a good way; in the way that results in tab groups degenerating into a cluttery, disused rec room, filled with forgotten junk tabs and unseen for weeks at a time.
- It's still buggy as hell, sometimes stops responding to clicks, and looks like ass more than half the time.
So okay, the underlying problem is that past a certain number of tabs, you'll want to split them into groups. Cool. We have a partial solution that has some problems, which is to split tabs into multiple windows. Also cool! I don't think it follows that the way forward is to forget windows exist and then create a new pseudo-window construct that's completely opaque to all the normal tools we have for managing window-like constructs. The only way that makes sense is in a ChromeOS-type situation, where a single window IS the entire operating system. I want Firefox to be an application, not a guest operating system; a citizen, not a resident alien.
And it's annoying that, for all that, it's so close. If you could invoke one unified full-screen Panorama view whose tab groups represented each open Firefox window, that would do the trick. Keep all the cool stuff about Panorama, but apply it to windows instead of some new like-a-window-but-shittier construct.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-17 08:27 am (UTC)Y'know, I heard about a year ago that some banks were starting to recommend people reboot their machines with a Linux live CD whenever they wanted to do their online banking. Which struck me as a pretty great idea, albeit an inconvenient one.