True Unity: Unity should unify windows and tabs with Content Based launchbar

[Rising Eagle]

True Unity. Is there a way to unify window launching and launching specific tabs within applications. For example, in Firefox, I may have many tabs open, yet my Awn doc has windows from Openoffice, synaptic, evince, and others. While reading a web page in Firefox, I will often go to Awn doc to restore a window to get relevant info, but the info is actually in another tab in Firefox. The dichotomy of window management schemes simultaneously active (tabs vs awn) causes my mind to make mistakes (wrongly remember where to go to retreive certain info) and to split its attention which distracts me out of my workflow. Gedit and nautilus also have tabs of their own. The problem is only getting worse. Every application is its own world with its own "launchbar" in the form of tabs. Applets is a third scheme for launching. There might be others.

I don't know how best to handle this problem, But What If each window (e.g., a config dialogue or synaptic) that is open on the active workspace and each tab (e.g., two tabbed web pages in Firefox and two more tabbed files in gedit) that is open in the many open applications on the active workspace are Unified in the workspace. Unity could present all the open items as tabs. In our example, the workspace would have six tabs on the launchbar, all under one roof. This way Unity would have a Content Based selection on its launchbar (and NOT an Application Based selection where the different content tabs for a given application are Bound within the launcher and frame of their host/parent application).

I'm not sure if applets should also be presented as tabs as well. The handling of applets as part of Unity could use a little more discussion, but my guess is that a case can be made that the applets are Privileged launchers. They probably deserve a similar, but more prominant status within Unity. Special treatment makes sense and is deserved. Yet their handling must still be cleverly blended and integrated into the Motif of Unity so that their handling is not really that different and we can therefore avoid the mind bending dichotamy described above.

The following is a similar idea I had on a previous occasion and is listed here for the interested reader.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/21462/

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

Hey Rising, thanks for your ideas there.

I think that you should discuss all those ideas in the ayatana mailing list where you will have more insight for a wide range of people.

I'm still adding a design task so that some designer can discuss it there, but you should really think about the ayatana mailing list :)

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

This is definitely wontfix for Natty. However, the idea is interesting,
perhaps open a design task, signal natty-wontfix but leave it open for
future analysis.

Mark