I've run cgminer manually on my ants and it worked fine
:edit
You know it would be easier to enable the cgminer remote api and use an external program to monitor your ant(s).
I use miner dashboard with my ants and its great! All you have to do is change the file mentioned above to add the enable api param.
https://github.com/selaux/miner-dashboardWhen you run cgminer manually, do you mean you've gotten rid of the init.d script that automatically starts it, and do something like:
screen -dmS AntCGMiner ./cgminer -o pool1 -u user -p pass ...
To the OP, I'm a bit confused by what you're asking. You stated you don't want to have multiple browser tabs running... how is that any different than having multiple putty windows running?
By the way, if you're looking for a good tool, check out mdude77's Antminer monitor:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596178.0