Over to stevenjb@ for panels triage (your favorite, I know - sorry).

When did you start seeing this?  Do we know what the regression range might be?  And is ReleaseBlock-Beta maybe a little aggressive for a bug that only affects whitelisted extensions on Windows10?

I started seeing this today, hadn't used Canary since Wednesday (and IIRC it was up-to-date then).

I don't know if it's Win10 only and hangouts is a pretty big extension isn't it? You can change to ReleaseBlock-Stable if you want but I think this should be addressed promptly.

This is intentional as part of the Panel deprecation on non-Chrome OS platforms, correct?

Yes, this is intentional change. See bug 571511 (although it does not give a lot of info). The Panels are being removed from desktop OSes (except ChromeOS).

There is updated Hangout extension that does not use Panels at all: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/knipolnnllmklapflnccelgolnpehhpl?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

Got it, so hee extension will be updated to have a better experience in the new world, right?

Currently it's a pretty big UX regression IMO.

I think the current experience is pretty unbearable... hangouts window just pop in the middle of the screen when initiating, or worse receiving, a new chat.

I don't care that they're not panels, but window placement is just horrible.

Re-opening and marking P1, since no one responded to #5 (i.e. maybe it's meant to be fixed in extension but right now it's not and it's horrible).

 Issue 625881  has been merged into this issue.

My understanding is that the Hangouts *Extension* is intended to be deprecated in favor of the *App*, although I note that it is still available in the Play Store, we should probably change that (or open a separate issue to change that)?

I'm not sure whether I have extension or app nor do I think users will be able to tell. If it's meant to be deprecated, it should ideally be automatically replaced or at the very least display an informal message to tell me what to do... It just going broken is not an acceptable user experience.

dimich@: Could you please update the thread for this Blocker issue as per C#9.

The decision to remove Panels API was made quite a long time ago, so it's not a bug but a planned deprecation of the specific window management functionality. The call was made based on high cost of developing/maintaining the custom windowing behavior across multiple OSes/versions/WindowManagers, which is not easy to justify given the usage. Being a fast, compact and high-quality browser for the Web is the ultimate Chrome goal. Please ask odean@ for more on the product motivation of the change.

As I mentioned in #4, the new Hangouts app is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/knipolnnllmklapflnccelgolnpehhpl. It does not use windows positioned at the bottom of the screen, it uses one big window and notifications as many other chat apps do.

The old one is also in the App Store, currently. It may be replaced with the new one at some point (hopefully before M53 goes stable) so it'll auto-update to the new one, but I can't talk on behalf of the Hangouts team. ivaylobakalov@, could you perhaps clarify the current state of the extension/app?

The main tracking issue for removal of the feature is bug 571511.

I'm going to remove Blocking status from this bug and resolve it again as Won't Fix. Please move discussion, if any, to the main launch bug, 571511.