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Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing?
kai_hiwatari writes "The recently released KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has introduced tabbed windows as a new feature. It is now possible to tab together windows from different applications. This looks like it will be a very good productivity tool. Like the tabbed browsers, this may well end up as a feature in all desktop environments in the years ahead."
Why is this a big deal?
Fluxbox (and probably something else before *box) had tab grouping windows long time ago.
The point is that we want to group windows by task, not by application. Let's say I'm working on a web application, so I have a window showing the contents of the project folder, a text editor, and a browser to test the application. At the same time (where "same time" doesn't mean that I do two things at once, but that I share my time between several activities over a range of many days), I'm writing a C program, so I have another editor window (or maybe an IDE), another project folder, a terminal with man pages, more browser windows for documentation, and so on.
The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on. This is stupid and useless. With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.
Google: Virtual Desktop
I've also seen Beta-software: Deskloops v2.0.1.0 (2007) - which tended to be somewhat buggy, but let you create Windows to contain other windows/apps.
More likely TaskBar customization will arise that allows customIcons to conain multiple apps/windows than a dated Tab implementation.