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What does a Facebook app offer over just giving the website notification permissions in Chrome or Firefox?

Personally, I like being able to Cmd+tab to commonly-used chat apps. Really hard to have a conversation (while doing other stuff) when you have to Cmd+tab to Chrome, and then find the tab.

So you need an app because OS X's window manager is terrible.

The window manager is not semantically aware that a particular tab in a particular window in a particular browser is the canonical navigation target for switching to a particular app.

A first class platform-native app provides this.

Vimium helped me with this - the `T` shortcut opens an omnibar that searches your open tabs for the text you're entering. It's still two-part, but it's keyboard shortcut + text search instead of visually identifying the correct tab and clicking on it.

In general is there a good browser extension or something for a "browser chat tab" that you keep open and don't want to manage as a normal browser tab/window? With a pulse-on-change feature?

Chrome->File->Create Application shortcut does this. Or is that not what you're looking for?

Could be a good use case for tab pinning, I suppose. Not quite what you're looking for though.

You can just move the "tab" to it's own window :)

But then it's Cmd+`

Worse, it's Cmd+Tab to _a_ Chrome window (maybe you get lucky) and only then Cmd+` to cycle through Chrome windows.

I can see some value to a chat app, not least to hold your presence to online. It's the app for the rest of it and the Instagram app that have me confused

I agree with the sentiment. Also typing 'facebook' into the address bar of FireFox the first result will be to switch to the facebook tab.

I would personally love it if Chrome tabs showed up in Spotlight. Then, ⌘+Space "slack" would either open up the app or the tab, no sweat. :-)

There is a plugin for Alfred where you can search/switch to a tab on all open browsers. Works on FF/Chrome/Chromium/Safari.

We can move tabs to new window. In that the task switcher will be able to go to the window directly.

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