Lately I'm thinking:

• remove the buffer tree, buffers become a linked list like in w3m
• add tabs
• add a "select buffer" menu that selects inside tabs

Why? Well the ideas I initially had for the buffer tree never materialized, and the UI still treats buffers as a linked list with extra steps. These extra steps in turn make it very hard to do any improvements to the UI (e.g. buffer selection).

Thinking of it, my gripes with w3m's tab system are also quite easy to solve:

• I dislike how it takes up a bunch of space on the top, even shifting the page when opening a tab. Solution: put the tab bar on the side ("vertical tabs"). Ideally on the right so it doesn't shift the screen. Maybe even as a pop up menu, so that it normally doesn't take up space.

• With w3m's tabs you can't browse other pages while one page is loading. This won't be a problem in Chawan because it has an asynchronous event loop.