One of the things that made me a proponent of tabbed browsing was that the myriad of browser instances which contained my random travails across the net hogged the space on my taskbar, rendering it useless.

At around the same time (in my adoption of it at least) windows started to group up instances of programs into single tasks on the taskbar and Mozilla browsers introduced tabs. This cleared up the clutter and the taskbar became useful again.

Since then I have some new frustrations that have evolved out of that shift in functionality.

Firefox hogs resources

I use Firefox because of its extensibility - I only run extensions that extend my browsing habits but because I run quite a few of them, Firefox’s memory footprint by late in the day is consuming 300-500 meg of memory.

Web-based applications are harder to get to, slower to switch to

Firefox is regularly tardy to respond, often busy undertaking loops for hundreds or thousands of Javascript loops which may appear to have equal priority. Windows is not great at managing multi-tasking either however I do think that it does take a more sophisticated approach than a browser’s internals.

This tardiness really frustrates me and creates friction for me getting to my core applications quickly enough.

I am not just browsing any more

It occurs to me that many of my Firefox tabs are not instances of browsing content but rather applications that I use either to do my job (web-based task systems, in-house utilities…) or to run my life (webmail, web-based calendar, contact manager…).

Applications should not be hidden amongst your browser tabs or competing for priority within a browser’s sub-system. They should have their own space, be easily accessible and be able to interact with other applications and your OS infrastructure (for example, notifications).

AIR, XULRunner to the rescue?

By making applications available in standalone, browser-based applications I think there is scope to bring our core applications back to surface rather than hiding them within the browser-space. Save that space for your research and other web meanderings.

Frameworks such as AIR  and XULRunner offer opportunities to rescue your core web-based applications from the fray.