
Do you remember Panorama or tab groups feature introduced by Mozilla with Firefox 4 which got so much hype then? but majority of users ignored it, currently there is a small user base using this feature. According to a bug 835758 Mozilla might remove panorama feature completely from Firefox code and wants to make it available for users in form of add-on, users don’ t lose any data and they’ll have Firefox tab groups add-on installed automatically which to offer same functionality.
Panorama/Tab groups feature to be ditched from Firefox
“Panorama has a very small user base and there’s basically no chance that we will enable it by default or even improve its visibility and discoverability anytime soon. In its current form it is indeed quite fragile and causes intermittent test failures here and there when touching platform code. We’re not going to spending any time on improving Panorama and its feature or its design and UX – thus it should just be removed from Firefox” says Tim Taubert, Firefox engineer at Mozilla..
Panorama/tab groups add-on for Firefox in works
Currently Tim Taubert prepared a patch that removes tabs groups and moved all panorama code to an add-on which you can find here. This add-on only works with the patch applied Firefox.
You can activate tab groups feature in Firefox with keyboard shortcut Ctrl+shift+E. Though we can’t see immediate action in place right now, we can expect future Firefox versions without having tabs groups feature.
Are you using Panorama? what do you think about this move? share with us in comments.
I have found Pano today. It is a so good stuff
No surprise ! When an option offer too much liberty … a business mind can find how to make money.
For me, I’ve found it and I block Firefox on 20.0
Thank god they are finally trashing that annoying piece of junk. It helps you organize tabs but it keeps them active. It’s not NEARLY as good as any number of the addons that do the same thing but without wasting memory and processing power by continuing to run the pages in the background.
It conflicts with the addon I really like for that, “tab groups manager” which is useful for saving a bunch of video pages for later viewing. Panorama will keep playing video for “saved” tabs which makes it completely useless to me. I use tab groups manager for basically short term bookmarks. Stuff I will want to get back to later but that I don’t want to clutter up my bookmarks with.
It’s a big fat lemon and it conflicts with the addons that do what it is supposed to do but do it right.
Good riddance