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Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing?

Posted by timothy on from the oh-for-the-love-of-gimp dept.

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."

4 of 528 comments (clear)

  1. Yes by Ark42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.

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    Morphing Software
    1. Re:Yes by Shin-LaC · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You might as well ask what's the point of having windows. The concept never really caught on in Windows, in spite of its name, but it's very useful to be able to have many things on screen at once, especially when none of them requires a full screen anyway.

      Take this web page: if you have a large widescreen monitor and you maximize the browser, you get a silly layout, with very long text lines that make reading harder. Many websites work around this problem by using a fixed width layout, but then you just end up with two large empty areas on the sides of the actual webpages; or, worse yet, they may be filled with animated advertisements. A better solution is to make the browser window only as wide as it needs to be, so you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation. If you have a large monitor, you can even open two web pages side by side.

  2. Re:Simply put by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?

    Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.

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    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  3. Re:Simply put by KrimZon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, plus spaces/workspaces offer the added benefit of being able to see multiple task-relevant windows at once. For example one to read from and the other to type into, or having multiple information displays at once.

    What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).