Prospector: Snaporama

324 views
Skip to first unread message

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 26, 2011, 5:38:24 PM7/26/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Snaporama is an addon designed to let you quickly "snapshot" groups of tabs into a bookmark folder and quickly open these snapshots into new Panorama groups.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prospector-snaporama/

Jithin Emmanuel

unread,
Jul 26, 2011, 11:43:38 PM7/26/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
This is a nice addon. I have a few suggestions.
1. Can the two icons be combined to one? "Over write existing snapshot" can be changed to "Open existing" and next to it provide an icon to replace it with current set of tabs.
2. Provide a toolbar icon?

Jithin Emmanuel

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 12:02:49 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Also one more suggestion.
An ability to hide folders firm the snapshot list. I dont want the whole list of folders under the bookmarks to appear here.
Otherwise this is a wonderful and very useful addon.

Caspy7

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 12:37:29 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
My mind was about to explode because I thought this would save the state of the tabs (like with sessionrestore) but it doesn't.  So right now this just saves tabs in folder in my bookmarks, which is something I can do on my own.

I have a problem and I know it, I have way too many tabs open.  If this saved tab-state it would be really awesome and helpful for me, but as it is, I won't use it.

Other notables:
- I have a dark persona on so the camera icon is black on black in the addon bar and so is invisible.  The gallery icon also looks bad on black.
- snaporama sounds like and is sold as being integrated into panorama, but with no UI in the actual Panorama interface it feels like I have to *leave* panorama to access it.  I'm expecting this would be the future intent, but if not, this could present a UX expectation issue.
- I don't like that much that I have to give it a name, but worse I don't like that it's taking up residence in my bookmarks (menu) at all.
 a) this is *temporary*, I don't want to have to go back through my bookmarks and clean them up.  I'm not in this habit and I don't want to be.
 b) Not a real issue for me, but some people may not appreciate that something they consider temporary history would be so readily accessible to others and pseudo-permanently stored. That is if there are tabs which I don't want someone else to know about, but they are now bookmarked - there's now a permanent memory so they're more likely to come up (in the long term) accidentally in the awesome bar.
- When I used it, the "create bookmark" window came up 5 times overlapping (maybe it came up fewer times when I first used it, but 5x at last count)

aelilea

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 5:42:38 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
As you are putting together an excellent addition to Panorama, could I make the following two suggestions (alright, blatant
feature requests :)

- "Snapshots" could be integrated into the Panorama view as -- minimized tab groups. This visual language is familiar to everyone and removes the need for an additional interface.

- Totally unconnected, but something I would love to see: a "list view" mode for tab groups, which hides the thumbnails and instead displays a scrollable list of titles. This would be useful when titles carry all the differentiating information (and the thumbnails don't) - quite common when most of the tabs in a tab group come from the same site. It would also be much better for groups with many tabs in them, certainly more useful than the current "stack of tabs" display.

Again, this is familiar from file managers, desktops, etc.

Jay Cassano

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 6:23:20 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I want to mostly second other comments that have appeared so far.

1) A toolbar button would be nice, for those of us like to avoid the addon bar for whatever reason.

2) This isn't actually integrated into panorama but is really a front-end for "bookmark all tabs in folder". It's a convenient quick-fix and it perhaps makes that already-existing feature a bit easier to use, but it's not actually part of Panorama. There are some suggestions in this thread already about how to approach that. I like the one about these snapshots being "minimized" (and *permanent!*) tab groups.

3) As is, it doesn't address the real problem: Like myself, a lot of people who first started using Panorama expected to use it as something that might replace bookmark folders - a set of tabs that reference regularly, like for a specific task that you do regularly and for which you need certain websites open. I - and I know lots of other people - were shocked when the first set up all their tab groups, closed firefox, and opened it later to find all their tab groups were missing. And simply using the "display all tabs from previous session" start up option isn't sufficient because that explicitly connects my tab groups to my currently viewed tabs. Panorama is really a fantastic innovation, but it needs a bit more rounding out to really work solidly.

As is, I would use prospector just as a somewhat more convenient "bookmark in folder" button - but only if it had a toolbar button. I won't keep the add-on bar open just for it.

Thanks for your time.

Dietrich Ayala

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 8:53:50 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Jay Cassano <cassa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1) A toolbar button would be nice, for those of us like to avoid the addon
> bar for whatever reason.

Go to Tools/Customize and drag it from the Add-on Bar to wherever you
would like it to be.

That's why the Add-on Bar exists - because any add-on that puts
themselves there can be customized by the user to be wherever they
want :)

Jamo

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 10:01:37 AM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I didn't read all the postings, but it would be nice, if Snaporama would save the App-Tabs! If not as real App-Tabs, at least as normal favorites. Best would be if one could choose wheter to save those Tabs in the Snapshot or not.

greets

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 1:24:42 PM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
The icon is movable if you click on "Customize toolbar" and then drag it to wherever you want. As far as a unified button is concerned, this was a bit deliberate because we kind wanted to keep the act of taking a snapshot and that of using one visually apart, but I like your idea, we'll see if we can find a good balance between the two.

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 27, 2011, 1:28:11 PM7/27/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Thanks, I'll look into more universal icons, and there's no plans to integrate this into Panorama just yet, just something on the side that might be useful to some people. Thanks for reporting the multiple windows bug, I have been able to reproduce it once and I'll look into it.

Bao Pham

unread,
Jul 28, 2011, 1:30:51 AM7/28/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
click take snapshot then it freezes my ff

Jithin Emmanuel

unread,
Jul 28, 2011, 2:32:04 AM7/28/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
One feature I miss most is incrementally adding to an existing snapshot.

Jeff Carlsen

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 12:57:43 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I feel like this is only further confusing the situation.

It always seemed to me that the answer for having far too many tabs open was always to bookmark the ones that aren't currently in use into a folder on the bookmarks toolbar. If one needed multiple groups of tabs for organization, it was simple enough to create a new window to drag tabs to.

Panorama created a new, invisible interface for managing the exact same behavior, clouding the difference between bookmarks and tabs while not actually combining the two.

This add on exacerbates that. Now you seem to be bookmarking open tabs, but not using the bookmark interface.

I feel like the whole thing is going to be a mess until tabs and bookmarks are completely combined or when people recognize that they serve different purposes.

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 1:44:52 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I admit this is nowhere close to solving the ultimate tab management problem, it was really just intended to ease up the interface to bookmark groups to people who would like to use them in combination with Panorama.

aelilea

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 2:07:00 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I just wanted to add the thought that such an add-on would demonstrate how to write add-ons that interface neatly with Panorama and show how to modify its interface.

So far there is a distinct lack of Panorama add-ons, and I suspect it's because nobody quite knows how to.

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 2:19:35 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
You're right, the lack is mainly because Panorama does not have an external API, especially for things like rearranging things, etc. I had to go into the Panorama object that the browser maintains to make this work. There is work on exposing a Panorama API under progress, I think you can ask around on #tabcandy on irc if you're interested.

Kith

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 8:05:37 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 5:42:38 AM UTC-4, aelilea wrote:
- Totally unconnected, but something I would love to see: a "list view" mode for tab groups, which hides the thumbnails and instead displays a scrollable list of titles. This would be useful when titles carry all the differentiating information (and the thumbnails don't) - quite common when most of the tabs in a tab group come from the same site. It would also be much better for groups with many tabs in them, certainly more useful than the current "stack of tabs" display.

I second the motion.  Creating a thumbnail is fine until they start to look similar.  A text list is always less ambiguous.
I would bring your attention to WebOS's Card Stacks for an example of where something similar has been done effectively.

Kith

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 8:10:39 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
There was some exploration done on the problem of Tab Proliferation a short time ago, but I haven't seen any action taken yet by the developers.  It's a shame, too.  There are some really good ideas out there!

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Jul 29, 2011, 10:26:31 PM7/29/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I like card view (just from the image, I haven't seen it in action yet), but I feel its very touch centric, another idea I accidently created while trying to do something else was stacking browsers.

http://blog.abhinavsharma.me/have-screen-will-browse-without-tabs

Kith

unread,
Jul 30, 2011, 5:13:29 AM7/30/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Reducing the number of tabs in the first place would be ideal.  I am particularly fond of David Regev's inline tab history proposal which is imaginative and would greatly simplify the browsing experience. 
The short explanation of inline history is this.  At present, when we click a link it either replaces the existing content or we open it in a new tab (or window).  Rather, it should open at the bottom of the existing content so that you can just continue scrolling down to read more of what you want.  This reduces the number of tabs open and obviates the need for a forward/back button entirely in one stroke!

Then, Panorama could really shine because then it would act less like a virtual desktop manager and more like a zoomed-out view of the browsing session!  It's easier for users to maintain this mental model, and I think Panorama would get quite a lot more use that way.

Jay Cassano

unread,
Jul 31, 2011, 5:09:15 AM7/31/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I'm aware of the ability to customize the toolbars. In fact I dragged the icon to a different toolbar, but the icon is tiny compared to the other navigation toolbar icons and the visual inconsistency was very distracting for me. Many, many add-ons have separate add-on bar and navigation bar icons (e.g. ad block plus, zotero, readability). Shouldn't be a huge issue for this to do the same.

Natanael L

unread,
Aug 23, 2011, 11:40:17 AM8/23/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Session Manager is an addon that probably would fit you perfectly.

Simon ALBERNY

unread,
Sep 16, 2011, 5:09:15 AM9/16/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
I've got exactly the same bug and I don't know if it's the same thing for you, but when I close the firsts windows and save the last one, I've got one entry with the good name in my bookmarks, and the others are named [Folder Name].

Peadar MacGabhann

unread,
Sep 22, 2011, 7:01:19 AM9/22/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
How do I roll back this....I don't like the way it works. It makes it difficult to forward messages from within a thread.
Please advise

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Sep 22, 2011, 10:42:59 AM9/22/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
This project is on hold for now unless someone from the community wants to pick it up and work on it. The source code is all in mozillalabs.com/prospector

Abhinav

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Peadar MacGabhann <peadar.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
How do I roll back this....I don't like the way it works. It makes it difficult to forward messages from within a thread.
Please advise

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mozilla-labs" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla-labs/-/Cs1GUEXX-asJ.

To post to this group, send email to mozill...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to mozilla-labs...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs?hl=en.

Abhinav Sharma

unread,
Sep 22, 2011, 10:43:13 AM9/22/11
to mozill...@googlegroups.com
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages