Web browser tabs, panel position, icons in the overview and a few more things.

[Ivan Denker <airsnail gmail com>]

I'm getting comfortable in the shell, liking it more and more and missing the taskbar less and less. But that's partly because most of my time is spent in Google Chrome, where I use its tab bar much like I used to use the taskbar. I worry that Chrome, and web browsers in general, still don't feel to me like they fit well in the shell.

With Chrome, the primary difficulty for me is having the panel on the top. Chrome works best without a top panel so the tabs can run along the edge of the screen, which is not possible with the shell. There are a number of reasons given in the design doc for putting the panel on top, and my understanding is that the notifications are going to be on the bottom. But I wonder it it would be possible to integrate notifications into the panel (there's lots of space, even if controls for maximized windows were added) and give at least the option of locating the panel on the bottom. I understand that a consistent interface is a priority and this is likely too fundamental to make a preference, but I myself don't see many drawbacks.

More fundamentally, on the topic of web browsing itself, not just Chrome, I wonder whether there is any discussion about integrating web pages into the shell's window management, whether with a tabless browser (using Epiphany?) or by somehow presenting tabs in the overview. Many of the applications I use often are on the web, which means that they are trapped inside my browser, where I can't manage them using the shell like I can local apps. I think it would be great if the shell made no distinction between Gmail and Evolution, or Banshee and Pandora. Tabs may make sense in an app like a text editor or terminal, but they don't seem so useful anymore with a web browser given all the various things that they now contain, both documents and apps. For what it's worth, no graphical shell right I've yet seen seems to resolve this well. Having the browser button open a launch page might work, but could the overlay handle the number of tabs people often have open currently? Maybe if people learned to trust that their history was easily searchable and browsable, and their programs were state-less then they wouldn't leave so many tabs open.

And a few more unrelated comments and questions:

I really like the alt-tab switcher, especially that it doesn't switch windows as you tab, which can create a lot of flashing, and that it uses icons not windows, icons often being more recognizable than thumbnails. That use of icons makes me wonder whether there are plans to associate icons with apps in the overlay mode, whether on the thumbnail or attached to the caption.

Will the status icons for network connection and wifi and such be made into native panel applets, with menus that look and slide like the calendar?

Are there plans to make the full width of the category names in the overview clickable, not just the little arrow on the right?

How about having a place to drag stuff to, a kind of shelf, whether for documents or parts of a web page or what not? This might be part of the sidebar, or maybe another hot corner. I imagine dragging a photo from a browser there, then switching to another page and dragging the photo onto it. Perhaps cases like that one are beyond the responsibilities or abilities of the shell, though.

And, finally, is there any consideration of allowing the panel to autohide? Since most of the action is in the two hot corners, I can imagine being happy with autohide (especially if the panel only appeared when a hot corner was hit, which might solve my problem with Google Chrome).

Hope this is the sort of feedback that is useful, and thanks for your work.