Comment 0 for bug 671880

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Rising Eagle (borntobesteve) wrote : True Unity: Unity should unify windows and tabs for Content Based information access

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 try to split its attention which takes me out of my workflow and make mistakes (wrongly remember where to go to retreive certain info). 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 all under one roof. This way Unity would have a Content Based selection on its launchbar (instead of an Application Based selection where the different content tabs for a given application are Bound within the frame of that 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 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 sooo different and we avoid the dichotamy described above.

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

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/21462/
4) Downloads. A minor point. Some have downloads directed to the Desktop. They may wish to maintain that setting even if the workspace changes. How this behavior is defined must be considered. For example, should such items be common to all workspaces or exclusive to the workspace currently active at the time of download.