I think before we submit this patch, we should agree on a general UI concept going forward.
TL;DR: I think tabs for the main window is the wrong approach and will alienate a lot of users
There are basically three main uses for tabs in an application (besides from preference dialogs).
The first approach is your basic webbrowser, who displays multiple webpages in each individual tab. This actually is something Apple tries to enforce anyway and others do as well, but always the content of the tabs are similar. It is always a webcontent or a textdocument, .... They can be opened and closed individually and do not care about or influence each other. The Wireshark equivalent would be a capture file. IO Graph and the packet list do influence each other deeply, as does the packet list and every other dialog.
Now in the second approach (e.g. iTunes or music player application), you may have tabs which present you the same data in a different method (Album, Artists, Playlist, ...). In these cases the tabs are always present, their view can be toggled, but in reality they are always there. Equivalent in Wireshark would be, that all dialogs are generated on capture file load and be always there, but hidden.
If tabs are not used for the main window, the usually are being used as utility tabs (see your favorite IDE e.g. QtCreator, Visual Studio, Eclipse, ...). This would be the third approach. They present additional information to the main document, a search possibility, graphical representation, ....
Wireshark's dialogs do not present different, independant data (first approach), but in the most cases an aggregated view (third approach) and sometimes an alternative view (second approach). Therefore, making them tabs to the main window is contradictory (as stated above). Users would have a program which operates very different to other programs they use daily. Making dialogs tabs to a utility window (byte view, packet detail) seems more to be the natural method. And then they can be dockable as well.
One last (but important) argument is screen size. A lot of people have big screens now. The tabbed approach for the main window really only makes sense on smaller screens. On a big screen tabs do not lead to a better utilisation of the space, making the work with a lot of tabs more cumbersome.
regards
Roland
