Actually, all those things can be handled by a competent window manager. If you had the ability to have tags on your windows, and quickly change your view based on those tags, that would be Awesome.

To explain the joke for those who like the idea of tags in a window manager, the parent post is referring to AwesomeWM (http://awesome.naquadah.org/).

(I normally don't go out of my way to explain jokes and thus kill the humor, but I figured it could be useful to some in this case)

Do you actually use it this way (with uzbl, for example)?

I have Awesome window manager and Firefox with the Pentadactyl (and previously Vimperator) plugin.

I use Awesome's tag system extensively. When tabs aren't in use, the task list then looks and works like tabs - that is they are lined up across the top and you can click on them.

Not only do you get the benefit of the tagging, Awesome can be controlled completely by keyboard. I have mine setup to use Vi-style keybindings. Combine that with both Firefox and tmux using Vi-style keybindings, and you get a really cohesive, reinforcing keyboarding system.

It works great on my netbook for a couple of extra reasons: Firefox's chrome in this setup takes up about 20 pixels (for the status bar, and even that can be hidden if you want), and I don't have to use the horrible trackpad nearly as much.

I do prefer this, but I should point out that there are a few of gotchas to working without tabs. First, Firefox 3.6 is much slower opening a window than a tab. Firefox 4 improves this quite a bit, but it's not yet stable. Second, the Vimperator/Pentadactyl keystroke for opening a window takes two keys (";w") instead of one ("f"); this is probably fixable, but I haven't done it yet. Third, I haven't found a way to make a window open in the background yet; that means to open a window, it's ";w [link]...[mod+j]" - I open a new window then switch back to what I opened it from.

I'm using vimperator now, I didn't know about pentadactyl, thanks!

I actually don't bother forcing everything into windows, I'm fine with firefox managing its own tabs. In fact, I rarely have more than two windows on any one tag (and I really only select one tag at a time...kind of a "everything runs in fullscreen" mode for the most part).