Early betas of Firefox 4 introduced a feature dubbed Tab Candy, which was promised to be the end of multi-windowed browsing and the panicle of content organization. The concept was spot on, but time constraints, technical difficulties, and the sheer vastness of the project caused the final product to fall far short of initial expectations. When Tab Candy was released with Firefox 4 as Panorama, it had lost most of its appeal already. It was too clunky and slow. Now, it seems, Panorama is on the right track.

Just like Firefox Sync, Panorama had a rocky start. Imagine having a place where you can peek at the content of all your tabs at once, group them together, organize them, and move them around. What if you could rename the groups, resize them, pin them and prioritize them? What if you could close groups and tabs, undo changes, and search through all the content in all your tabs? And what if, no matter what windows are active, all your groups and tabs were available on demand as you need them, and any changes would carry over to everything else? It is the concept behind Panorama, but it hasn’t quite lived up to its promise.

So what problems does Panorama currently face? To be honest, not a lot.

Panorama’s biggest issue isn’t features. It is rather a compilation several minor details that need to be addressed. For example, Firefox’ session restore: When Firefox is closed, or if Firefox crashes, the browser will offer to start up all previously open pages in the exact same format. However, Panorama does not quite work this way: As it stands right now, when manually closing down the browser (using  the x button), your session is set by the last window you closed. This means that if you had multiple windows open, but one had your panorama groups and the rest didn’t (and your panorama window was not the last to be closed down), session restore would not register your panorama groups and they would all be lost. This is not what you expect, and it is being fixed for the next version.

Another issue Panorama faces is the impact on the browser’s start up time. When you start your browser, even if you have 50 different tab groups and 250 different tabs, you will only see the tabs in the last group you visited until you switch to another group. If you start your browser up and see only 3 tabs, you expect Firefox to only be loading three tabs. The other 247 shouldn’t matter until you actually need them. Firefox Panorama currently loads all your tabs simultaneously. This means that instead of only having three of your tabs load at startup, you are, in fact, loading all 250. This is not what was intended and is yet another fix done by Mozilla at this time.

These two fixes are close to being complete and will be available soon. However, one major feature that is still missing is multiple window support.

At this time, your panorama groups are only available in the windows you assembled them. If you want to move a group from one window to another, you have to create a new group and move the tabs one-by-one by dragging them to their new destination. Most people who are interested in organizing their tabs would prefer if multiple tabs/windows could be selected at the same time, no matter where they are in the browser. The fix is quite complicated, from a technical perspective, but is already being worked on.

The solution the Firefox team came up with is an always up to date, fully synced Panorama view that is independent of the state of windows. As you create a new tab or group in one window, it will automatically appear in the other ones you have open as well. If you open a new window, everything should be there as well.

A handful of fixes as well as multi-windows support added, Panorama should be vastly more useful and bring Panorama closer to the feature it was promised to be. In the next releases of Firefox, much like with Sync, Panorama should “simply work.”

All Nightly, Developer and Beta Channels currently include the new Panorama features.

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