tabs?, not tabs, tabs?

[Yosuke Arai]

This is a bit off-topic...

I've always been wondering why all the tab browsers - at least Safari, 
Camino, Firebird, Mozilla/Netscape, Opera and iCab - had tabs only 
above the browser screen, not having options of below. If tabs are 
metaphors of some kind of spreadsheets, then I think having tabs BELOW 
the browser screen (like Microsoft Excel spreadsheets) makes more 
sense. Besides, tabs themselves are no good-looking, especially when 
only a few tabs are open. (Safari looks worst for this point.) I prefer 
hiding tabs when only one tab is open inside the browser window for 
cosmetic reasons, but what will happen if when I create a new tab to a 
window with only one tab is open? The browser screen moves downward a 
little to have tabs, which takes time to redraw the contents. It's 
awkward.

Also, as a Mac OS X user, you naturally want to control the tabs in the 
Dock style, but no browser offers such function fully. You can't drag 
and drop tabs to rearrange the orders, you can't throw away the tab 
when you finished reading the webpage, etc.

And the tab drawer in OW 5.0 seems to solve all my questions in a very 
elegant way. I welcome this and can't wait to try the public beta! I 
can see many heavy tab users are against this drawer approach, but what 
a pity they  are saying so before taking much time to play with it. 
It's true that tab drawers consume horizontal space, but how much 
percent of the webpages you regularly pay a visit to require you to 
browse with full-screen width? The final version of OW5 may implement 
traditional tabs, but I will stick to the drawer style browsing 
anyway....

Yosuke Arai