Firebug, from what I can tell, uses one element to display its console. Somehow, it hides and displays the panel in a very smooth fashion when users switch tabs.
My goal is to emulate this behavior in my own Firefox extension.
For instance, let's say you open three tabs, and Firebug is only opened on the first tab. If you quickly switch through all the tabs, it appears like the console is attached to the HTML document because there is no flickering of the Firebug console, even though behind the scenes, it seems (from browsing the code) to collapse/display the console depending on whether you activated Firebug for that tab.
When I try to emulate the same thing (i.e., only show a pane for a given tab), there is noticeable flickering as you switch through the tabs. What I did was attach a progress listener to detect when someone switches tab. Upon tab switching, I either display/collapse the pane.
Any clues?