Comment 12 for bug 749335

Chrome's tab code is a lot more complicated than it might appear; I pity the person who would attempt to rewrite it. (Complex drag and drop behaviors, multiple types of animations in the icons, different sizes of tabs and positioning behavior, animations, http://www.theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/ ...)

I think the only practical way to implement this would be if the top panel exposed an API for us to inject our tab strip in the right place. (The panel used to support panel applets, which more or less do exactly this; it would be a cool hack to make a "chrome tabs" panel applet, much like how the window switcher used to work. I think all this applet stuff has been removed in recent Ubuntus though.)