Heh, yeah, I just want to learn both because they can both do cool things. Did a quick check, if the browser is not open, dbus is not used to launch it. But the browser has its own signal internally which it will respond to if you send 'new_window' via dbus to the browser directly. The bookmark plugin does this if there is already a window open. WRT the two line thing, the bookmark applet is closed but you've most likely noticed that the application list can do it and the code for that is in hildon-desktop.