I was taking at look at how the synced tabs UI refresh is going to appear in the product, and I feel there are some deficiencies that we’ve overlooked as a group.
One important issue is that we should avoid letting the functionality on about:sync-tabs regress, unless that’s an explicit goal. Fx 45 will ship the Synced Tabs menu panel ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1201331), and it also removes affordances to open about:sync-tabs from the History menu. Unfortunately, the menu panel has two gaps that are functional regressions from about:sync-tabs: 1) The panel doesn’t show all your remote tabs (currently it limits each device to 15). 2) The panel doesn’t allow you to search your remote tabs. I feel this may have been recognized before, but since we expected the Synced Tabs sidebar to ship concurrently with the panel work, we may have felt this wasn’t an issue. Now that the sidebar will ship a release or two later, it’s probably a functional regression worth addressing. The second significant issue is that the 46 uplift date is looming. The sidebar work (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210586) is r+’ed and ready to land, but still likely needs further polish and testing. Here’s my proposed plan: 1) Added a pref, say “syncedTabsUIRefresh”, that defaults to true on Nightly, and false elsewhere. 2) Add a guard (based on the above pref) to the History “Synced Tabs” menu item. If syncedTabsUIRefresh==true, then it will open the panel (as it currently does), otherwise it will open about:sync-tabs. This will allow users to experience the new panel if they want to, but for users that relied on seeing all their remote tabs and search them via the History menu item, their experience will not be regressed. 3) Add a guard (based on the above pref) around the exposure of each affordance that opens the Synced Tabs sidebar. 4) When we’re happy with the quality of Synced Tabs sidebar UX and the functionality of the whole experience, we can uplift a patch that defaults the above pref to true for everyone, allowing the new combined UX to ride the trains to release in a way that doesn’t regress the current functionality in about:sync-tabs. I reached consensus with Zach, Ryan, and Edwin about this today, and Zach is starting on the engineering. Mark do you have any thoughts about this? Others? -chris
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