Improve Panorama interactions

Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
Simplify Panorama UI	Initial list of improvements ready, needs bugs + developer estimates	N/A	Alex Limi

Summary

Panorama has a lot of small interaction problems, and some conceptual problems too. We'd like to spend some time to eliminate as many of these as we can.

Team

• Feature Manager: Alex Limi
• Lead Developer: Tim Taubert
• Product Manager:
• QA: George Carstoiu (irc: GeorgeCarstoiu)
• UX: Alex Limi
• Accessibility:
• Security:
• Privacy:

Designs

Must-have:

• You can't click a group to activate the whole group (Creating a new group and clicking in it should just create a blank new tab) (Don't show the drag cursor on groups now that entering the group is the dominant operation. Dragging could still work, of course.) (Remove New Tab button)
  
• When creating a new group, autofocus the title field (also for creating groups by dragging)
  
• Tabs should not be able to exist without a group
  
• a new group control
  
• an exit control
  
• a text field to filter instead of the search icon
  

Nice-to-have:

• Multiselect is not supported in groups
• Blank groups with no name get removed, shouldn't
  

Stuff we are undecided about or don't know current state of:

• Never show me groups when I haven't asked (closing the last tab in a group, Aero Peek)
  
• minimize need for manual positioning and grouping
  
• Groups from Panorama could show in List All Tabs — but we should probably just show the group names, not individual tabs. Related: bug 596017
  

Already fixed:

• FIXED: Private mode ungroups your tabs (still the case?)
  
• FIXED: When you close the last tab in a group, you automatically get sent to another open group, is this what we want?
  
• FIXED: Hitting Cmd-W when in panorama removes the selected tab, which is unexpected (it feels like a window operation at that point)
• WONTFIX: You can't detach a group to a window
  
• FIXED: Text editing doesn't support arrow keys
  

Next Steps & Open Issues

• Talk to the Panorama team about prioritization and estimates
• Make sure all of these have bugs filed
• Wireframes/interaction spec for the bugs that need it

Related Bugs & Dependencies

• Bug 583435 - Control/Command Click in Tabcandy should select multiple tabs (shift-click should select a range)
• Bug 596017 - Combine the Panorama button and the List Tabs button and list all tabs+groups in List Tabs drop-down
• Bug 607108 - focus group name field after creating new group
• Bug 607383 - Reduce redundant display of app tabs in panorama view
• Bug 617454 - faster zoom with imposter technique (particularly for slower machines)
• Bug 630792 - Add a close button and small toolbar to Tab View
• Bug 649316 - allow closing tabs in panorama with del and cmd+backspace
• Bug 654295 - Closing last tab of a group doesn't show Panorama
• Bug 654721 - Remove the "orphan tab" concept from Panorama
• Bug 663421 - Don't close empty groups automatically
• Bug 663611 - display default cursor when hovering tab groups
• Bug 663612 - clicking a group should zoom into the group's active tab
• Bug 663613 - remove "new tab" button from groups
• Bug 663614 - remove double-click to create a new tab in a group
• Bug 663617 - highlight tab groups when hovering them
• Bug 663622 - notify the user that session restore was enabled