From: Robert O'Callahan Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 5:05 PM What happened to my idea for browsers to have a special window containing tabs for "background apps", which save screen real estate by just showing an icon and title (and a URL or domain?) and no actual tab content? You might modify the UI so that quitting the normal browser leaves this window open, possibly as a separate OS app. Seems to me that this would provide almost exactly the desired functionality but without introducing new security concerns and without requiring a trust decision.
Rob How many applications do we expect any one user to have open? I would imagine one would do fine on the Taskbar or in the Notification Area, like other programs, but a manager would be good if a user had a great deal of applications running at once. The manager would have to stay out of the way, though; either by being called up through a menu option, like the downloads page, or by minimizing to the notification area. Whether you quit the main browser or not, the browser process would have to remain loaded, correct? Otherwise, it would be impossible to render pages. The browser itself IS a desktop app, and has a lot of freedom; it could stay silently in the background, or manage the applications itself, or give certain rendering abilities to the application window. As such, we should keep it in mind while we plan. An API for browsers to spin off a website as another application would be something to look into.
