Global App Tabs

Status

Team

Open issues/risks

`

Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

App Tabs were always meant to be global across windows, but because of release constraints and timing issues, this didn't happen in Firefox 4. We'd like to complete this feature.

This feature falls primarily in the Experience category (from the "Discover, Experience, and Connect" vision statement.)

2. Users & use cases

Users: People who use app tabs

3. Dependencies

`

4. Requirements

`

Non-goals

• Tab groups won't become global
• App tab UI in panorama
• Not changing UI (toolbars, notifications, etc)

Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

`

6. User experience design

• App tabs should appear on every window, and be global
  • Title changed notifications are propagated (and cleared) across all windows
• If two windows are showing the same app tab, we use our ability to re-parent the tab to the other window to make the transition between the two as seamless as possible.
  • We will not update both windows, e.g. if you type in one window, it won't be updated in the other window until that window is activated.
• This will also make it harder to accidentally lose app tabs — since they'll be global in every window.
• It also makes it possible to simplify how we handle app tabs in Panorama quite a bit, both on the UI and implementation side of things.

Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

`

8. Reviews

Security review

`

Privacy review

`

Localization review

`

Accessibility

`

Quality Assurance review

`

Operations review

`

Stage 4: Development

9. Implementation

• bug 587873

Stage 5: Release

10. Landing criteria

• It's capable of showing app tabs across all windows (but not popups)
• Handle having the same app tab open in multiple windows

Feature details

Team status notes

We'll want some documentation about the upgrade path. People may be used to the current behavior of app tabs being per window.