Yep, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that they are empty: it provides a clear area where you can grab and move the window. When I see the examples in the articles: how the f**k are you supposed to move these ? This is also what I don't like with chrome and the new firefox quantum: when your bar is full of tabs, good luck moving the window.

I know that multi-tasking is kind of overrated these days, but come on, some people still uses their desktop to do more things at once ...

God damn it, I'd have bet there would be a comment like this.

I think there is only one thing Mozilla got wrong with this bar: when migrating from FF2 to FF3, the initial behavior of this bar should have matched the database of the previous version. Because, like you, I were also annoyed when the list they presented what not was I used to see.

But, at one point I stopped bitching and decided to give it a (real) try. Guess what? I'll never come back to original behavior, to the point where it is painful for me to use a browser that do simple matching like FF2 do (or earlier version of Safari, IE, ...).

Huh, what version of Firefox are you using ? There has been new version since Phoenix 0.8. Firefox has been using Win32 api for rendering its control for ages now, but that's not the point.

The point is, if you want to have an uniform look in Windows (and OS X) you only have to use the Win32 API, or a toolkit that is based on this API (a lot of them). And it will work from Win95 (okay, better NT4) to Vista. Just because some (maybe too much) vendors are doing crappy interfaces by reinventing the wheel, doesn't mean everybody has to do the same.

For Linux, if you're targeting Gnome, it will be very hard to also target KDE, since they have incompatible API, and some licensing issue (LGPL vs GPL) with their core frameworks. Thus integration will suck.