Tab Focus:

[Abhinav Sharma]

Tab Focus is a Prospector experiment to help reduce tab clutter using Panorama. Read the blog post here:

http://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/07/14/tab-focus-automagically-organize-tab-groups/

[pH7]

Your "browse tree" is a great idea!! Why not just do that instead?

-pH7

[Abhinav Sharma]

I currently pull out all elements from your current tree into a new Panorama group. The goal for this project was to reduce clutter by grouping tabs, not really re-visualizing tabs differently. I've seen some excellent ideas along those lines though, there's a bunch here:

http://design-challenge.mozillalabs.com/summer09/

[Jithin Emmanuel]

Does not work when there is more than one tab. Pressing Cmd + Shift + L will switch to panorama and immediately switch back. Like I pressed Cmd + Shift + E again.
Also I opened a link from gmail that link alone went to a new tab group. Ideally the tree starts with gmail right ?

[Mathnerd 314]

Tooltip says "Launch Recall Monkey".

[BK]

Thanks for the add-on, I really like the idea!
One thing I notice is that the new Panorama group disturbs all my other groups quite a bit. This is probably not specific to your add-on, but it is a little bit annoying since I have to resize all tab groups after closing the new one.

Also (already mentioned), the tooltip says "Launch Recall Monkey"

Keep up the good work!

[Lloyd Atkinson]

In my opinion, this is a very important feature for Panorama. I was quite excited about Panorama, but immediately on using it I found that I had to change my workflow to manage and maintain the tab groups. I didn't take the time to do this, so it went unused.

My wife is the exact target audience for the feature, she has like 50 tabs open over a number of days. I showed her Panorama, she got excited, tried it once, and immediately found that it didn't work for her because just like a to-do list app, or any number of getting-things-done productivity improvements, they demand an investment of time to get anything out of them. You must change your habits, your workflow, and human nature is simply not amenable to that.

The tab grouping process has to be fully or semi-automatic, or it won't get used by anyone except a tiny niche willing to invest effort. Tab Focus is a good step in that direction. I'd really like to see this iterated.

One thing that would be good for Tab Focus, but Panorama in general, is auto-arrange. Maybe it already exists and I haven't found it. But especially with Tab Focus creating groups autonomously, auto-arrangement becomes important so that the groups don't overlap and bunch in the top left corner.

[Abhinav Sharma]

I used some of the same code to start, will fix in the next version, thanks for pointing that out.

[Abhinav Sharma]

The main reason for that i that there's no nice API into Panorama for moving things around and keeping them clean, so I just have to inject a new tab group and hope Panorama deals well with it. I hear the Firefox team is working on improving the Panorama API, so I'll see what we can do once we're there.

[Tan]

I dont use the addon bar at all.
Can you make a toolbar icon instead?

[jiyin yiyong]

I've installed this addon, works well, I think it's quite useful to me.
It has been unconveninent to access Panorama since the shortcut was changed to 3 keys.
I like Panonara, just similar to multidesktops in Linux.
I even imagine there was new ways to manage tabs, more than click links.
Here's what I'm thinking about:
load Panorama everytime one clicks on a link or begins to drag it;
then focus to the page when he/she finishes adjusting the position;
when we need to open new tabs, just choose a place in Panorama by clicking to active location box;
then type in URL, or just drag some quick start icons from tool bar to load pages.
So every page has its position, and zoom out to give more space to place more pages.
Also we may use selected arae to put them into groups, that's useful.
I'm agree that the Panaroma needs more efficient features.

[Yukun]

The idea is great, but there is a small annoyance. Enabling this add on causes the add on bar at the bottom of the screen to be shown every time I restart Firefox despite the fact that I hide the add on bar when it appears after a restart.

[Abhinav Sharma]

Thanks for all the feedback. We're working on a new version of Tab Focus, with some major changes. We're waiting on pushing until until we can get approval from addons.mozilla.org so we can push regular updates.

Abhinav

[Barbudo]

In my opinion the tab grouping process has to be fully automatic. Tab focus group all the tabs of the same URL of the current tab, but I think Tab focus need another button to group all the tabs not only from the current tab.

Also I agreed with "One thing that would be good for Tab Focus, but Panorama in general, is auto-arrange. But especially with Tab Focus creating groups autonomously, auto-arrangement becomes important so that the groups don't overlap and bunch in the top left corner."
Thank you for Tab Focus.

[Abhinav Sharma]

Yes, you can right-click on an empty space in the bar and click on customize, then you can drag the icons into any toolbar you want.

[Abhinav Sharma]

Fully automatic tab grouping is a hard problem, and not as much technically as psychologically. Different users tend to group tabs differently in their mind. One user may consider Google Docs and YouTube together to be a distraction while the other views it as a well needed break. As far as automatically arranging Panoramas in space goes, I believe the UX team is looking into it and other things about the future of Panorama.

[Delirium tremens]

Tab Mix Lite groups automatically by opener by colors.
You can group automatically by opener, the window is the group and the tabs are the items.

I visit two sites.
In the first, I click a link, fx opens a tab, the first and the tab turn into a group, so fx moves them to their own window.
In the second, I click a link, fx opens a tab, the second and this new tab are already in their own window, so fx does nothing.