blog responses, window managers, tabs

One of the annoying things about blog aggregators is the high cost of writing a followup to some unimportant fallacy someone else wrote in their blog on the aggregator. It's much harder than hitting "r" in a mailing list.

If you are "ion" users, use a webbrowser written for ion by ion users.

So I'm not sure if it's worth my time to point out to Erich Schubert that gnome is not the world, and that one of X's great strengths is letting me run individual programs from gnome and kde in ion. Which is not a desktop environment and for which large quantities of special purpose programs (let alone special purpose web browsers!) will never be written. It's certianly not worth my time to properly link back to his silly blog post about it.

By the way, ion is a tabed window manager, which means that the window manager, not individual apps in it, takes care of drawing and managing tabs onscreen. This makes just as much sense to me as it does for a window manager to draw close, minimize, maximize buttons (although ion doesn't bother with those), or for the window manager and not the app to provide resize handles. Apps like xmms that provide their own close, resize, window shade, etc widgets end up looking strange and being hard to use in every environment.

It wasn't that long ago that window shading was a cutting edge new feature, so it might have made sense to implement it in an app back then, but it's in any self-respecting window manager now (except, arguably, ion ;-), so it's time to let go and let the window manager take care of it. I think the same will happen with tabs.

So I also have a hard time taking seriously Axel Beckert's winging a about specifics of galeon's internal implementation of tabs. Although I can't bear to properly link back to his blog posts about it either. If you find a window manager that does tabs well, your tab problems will be solved, not only for this browser, but for all applications.