Hyatt write about tabbed browsing’s usefulness not as MDI, but as a tool for grouping/organization, which is especially true with the advent of bookmarking groups of tab. Now, of course, one of the problems that this suffers is that the longer you browse, the more likely that your tabs will start getting mixed around and disorganized (especially a pain when you’re trying to bookmark groups of tabs). I think the best way to solve this problem is not through more interface clutter at the context-menu or main browser chrome, but to have a separate ‘tab manager’ window that allows reparenting of tabs. I’ve submitted this as an RFE (159853). Hmm, I wonder if this suggestion will get me flamed by mpt. Lord knows he sure loves tabbed browsing sooo much.
Perhaps this could be done as a separate XUL project, although the reparenting aspect of it could get pretty hairy. Speaking of XUL, Ian Oeschger mentioned Bugxula at the Mozilla BOF session at OSCON. While having a XUL interface to Bugzilla is an improvement, I don’t think it’s going to solve the fundamental usability problem with Bugzilla. It just slows to a crawl too much when people are grinding away on complex queries/reports. I still think that there should be a better search interface on static pages when people just want to search/view bugs. I think that’d fix a lot of the problems with so many duplicate bugs (as it’s such a PITA to search). As a bonus, Bugzilla probably also wouldn’t have to worry so much when it gets linked from /.