About a year ago, in
my FOSDEM 2009 talk, I presented our future vision for SeaMonkey, containing the "Everything Is A Tab" plan that should bring browser, mail, web editing, and probably even preferences into tabs that can live in the same window.
Now I read in
jboriss' blog post on add-on manager that the Firefox team is thinking about putting the add-on manager in atab, and possibly also - who would have thought that - preferences!
Sounds like different people come to the same ideas, and I really hope we can move that way - esp. as this, when it is done correctly, should still allow anyone to open those things as "the only tab in a window" which should make it act and feel just like a normal standalone window and so still gets the same user experience to those people who don't want to have all those things in tabs.
(That said, I still think tabs are mostly an excuse for having a bad window manager and bad window managment widgets in the desktop environment, but having gone through some strange bugs in my on-the-edge development desktop versions, I needed to resort to tabs as well and found the grouping of related tabs in windows an actually quite interesting and seductive feature myself...)
I just wonder who will manage to get the "Everything Is A Tab" story actually implemented first - Firefox may have the advantage of a larger development team and fewer different things to host in tabs...
