Accommodating the future Firefox?

[Ivan Denker <airsnail gmail com>]

The Firefox folks are rethinking tabs, and some of their ideas may be useful to Gnome Shell, or at least worth planning for. (They are considering a left side slide out sidebar, for example, which might compete with Gnome's.)

http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the-browser

As excited as I am by all their cool ideas, I worry that as Firefox moves beyond tabs and Gnome moves away from the taskbar, the browser will become an increasingly self-sufficient tab/page manager with a competing interaction paradigm nested inside the shell. Maybe a well-integrated Epiphany could blur the arbitrary distinctions between Web Apps and Desktop Apps? The bread crumb thingie seems like it might offer enough speed and directness to replace browser tabs entirely.

(I'd be happiest, for what little it's worth, being able to integrate local apps (Banshee and Transmission, mostly) into Google Chrome. It's got the best taskbar I've used (close buttons, drag and drop, smart sequencing, window tiling), it maximizes screen space, and the new tab page is a perfect menu (frequently used and recently closed stuff, and text search of web pages, my history and my google docs. Just this week they added ingenious ways to pin and remove items.) But I'm mostly just a web surfer...certainly not a "power user".)