The roads I take...

I just landed a change today that switches SeaMonkey to tabbed browsing by default. Umm, yes, that sounds like a message from years ago, but it really is of today.

The Mozilla suite has been supporting tabbed browsing for a very long time, and SeaMonkey inherited that support right from the start. Still, what we also inherited and had not even changed in our huge modernizing effort in 2.0 is that the default preferences favored opening new windows in all kinds of cases. Whoever wants to use tabbed browsing in stable version of SeaMonkey up to 2.0.x need to explicitely open tabs and/or change preferences to make SeaMonkey open tabs by default.

Finally, that changes with tomorrows nightlies, SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 3 and the final 2.1 release expected later this or very early next year (i.e. at a very similar time to Firefox 4).

From now on, SeaMonkey will default to open links and other new pages in tabs, just like Firefox already does. Anyone who still wants windows to be opened is now the one who needs to change preferences or do it explicitely.

Thanks to Neil for swift reviews on that preferences change. This is another step towards making SeaMonkey actually show that it really is a modern browser - and more.

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!)