Firefox/Features/Persist Panorama Groups

Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
Panorama groups should always persist	Patches available, working on test coverage	2011-03-25	Alex Limi

Summary

When quitting Firefox with Panorama groups active, there's currently a perceived data loss, since you can close them in the wrong order, and lose your groups.

Team

Who's working on this?

• Feature Manager: Alex Limi
• Lead Developer: Tim Taubert
• Product Manager:
• QA:
• UX: Alex Limi
• Security:

Release Requirements

Open Firefox with multiple windows with groups in them, close one window at a time, start Firefox again — you shouldn't lose your groups, ever.

Next Steps

• Review patches
• Test that it performs as intended, and that there aren't any side effects

Open Issues

• Including this feature without making Panorama groups load on demand will make the browser seem slow, since it's restoring groups that aren't visible
• Solving this problem might be easier if we get Panorama groups to be global, that's bug 578512.

Related Bugs & Dependencies

bug 595601, bug 625016, bug 587400.

Designs

Interaction is described in bug 595601.

Use Cases

See Summary. :)

Test Plans

None so far.

Goals

Prevent perceived data loss from Panorama groups.

Non-Goals

Note that it's important that we revisit this implementation when we later switch to a modal where windows == panorama groups. That is not currently a goal of this project, but it will later relate back to this project. Under that modal, the danger is that Firefox will persist every window the user has ever created in panorama (which for users who don't use the tab strip but instead favor separate windows, would be a very large number). So later the approach will be to only persist panorama groups that the user has named/starred: design mockup