I’ve been looking for a way to gain more vertical space and utilize the horizontal space (like putting the toolbars on the left or right of an application) for a while.
With video displays moving to the widescreen format, moving toolbars to the side instead of the top of the application just makes sense.
There is an extension for Firefox that allows you to put your tabs on the left side of your browser instead of taking up space at the top.
The cool thing about this extension is that there are a few more bells and whistles than the original tab bar to play with.