The roads I take...

I've just watched Alex Faaborg's video about Tabs On Top for Firefox 4, and as I have been thinking about that topic for years now, I think it's time I put down my thoughts as a "SeaMonkey guy".

Now, some people would assume, that being a "SeaMonkey guy" must mean I'm totally opposed to this as we're widely considered to be the completely conservative kind of folks.

But then, my thoughts base on the fact that we've been talking about running browser, mail, HTML editor, chat, preferences, and whatever else all as tabs that can live in a single window (see our long-term vision) - and I actually can't imagine getting that right without placing tabs on top ultimately (think of toolbars needing to change between different kinds of tabs, for example).

So, I think that for an application suite that allows mixing tabs, it's ultimately a must to do that, and that makes me think in favor of this idea in general. Even now, having SeaMonkey's Site Navigation bar to be only displayed when needed makes my tabs bar jump around, which is nasty. Also, adding find bar on top of the web content should still place it under the tab bar and not make it jump, as it will do in our first implementation.

What I'm still unsure about, though, is how to deal with things like the bookmarks bar or the menu bar, if one has shown them, and unfortunately, Alex also left those out. Also, things like additional app toolbars added by add-ons are something we still need to figure out completely.

I know some users will be upset, and it must be a preference in the beginning, but for SeaMonkey purposes, I don't see how we should ever get mail tabs and browser tabs into a single window if we don't move tabs to the top.

Still, I'd love some ideas about the problems I pointed to. Any thoughts?

(Oh, and, of course, we still need someone to implement/port the actual code to even enable this in SeaMonkey - help would be appreciated!)