What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.
I implemented tabbed windows for NeWS, UniPress (Gosling) Emacs, and the HyperTies hypermedia authoring tool in 1988, and shipped them in a commercial product (UniPress Emacs 2.20).
They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version of Emacs to support opening multiple windows, so you ended up opening a LOT of them at once, which the tabs really helped with).
The Wikipedia page describes my earliest implementation of tabbed windows for NeWS in 1988, and has a screen snapshot of tabbed windows and pie menus with UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES on NeWS:
And later at Sun I re-implemented tabbed windows and pie menus for TNT (The NeWS Toolkit), and we implemented an ICCCM X11 window manager for X11/NeWS that could consistently apply tabbed windows with pie menus to all X11 and NeWS windows.
Here's a demo of tabbed windows for The NeWS Toolkit (which we could wrap around X-Windows too):
This posting describes different versions of tabbed windows, including PSIBER with tabbed windows for PostScript objects that you can impale on a "spike" that represents the PostScript stack, the tabbed pie menu X11/NeWS window manager:
These discusses the advantages of putting tabs on the side (and enabling users to move them around the any side: top, bottom, left or right), instead of just the top:
Very impressive. I wish this had become a common feature of GUIs beyond the browser.
One thing I liked a lot about the Windows95 GUI when it was introduced were the tabbed property and settings. They kind of went by the wayside as a general concept though they survive in places (not that I’ve had much experience with Windows over the course of the past 20 years or so).
On the topic of moving tabs, I was a BeOS user and one thing that I enjoyed enormously (albeit in an infantile and purposelessly inchoate manner) was sliding the yellow title tab around by holding (if I remember correctly) the shift key. It wasn’t ever developed into something useful but it was fun and suggested it would be made into a useful feature.
I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?
Some window managers can't. Browser work around with tabs. It's fine for most of the users, it's missing opportunity for some. At least I was not able to disable tabs completely.
What I would like, is Emacs/Vim-style buffers. When you don't have one open, it's completely invisible. When you want to switch to it, you perform an incremental search for its title. No need to hunt for things on the screen. A lot faster and a lot more tidy wrt what's currently visible on the screen. No distractions.
I’m not arguing for the multi-window alternative. Indeed in MacOS I quite like the tabbed interface for applications. It just amuses me how when the problem re-arose, we solved it differently than we had previously.
Tabs is a form of "Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface"?
Windows MDI is a nested window manager. Tile and Cascade, move and resize, maximize, minimize. That is gone. Windows stay maximized, title bar eaten by buttons and tabs.
Also I can look on the link I post and Ctrl+F "Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface"
> Microsoft Word 2003: MDI until Microsoft Office 97. After 2000, Word has a Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface, thus exposing to shell individual SDI instances, while the operating system recognizes it as a single instance of an MDI application.
Interestingly, the oldest archive of that addon page says version 4.14 was released three weeks after that XKCD strip - so excepting that it probably didn't have all the features of xmonad, we did have tiled browsing before XKCD suggested it.
Unfortunately, it's among the many killed off when legacy extensions were dropped. There is a webextensions version now, but it's not very useful - all it does is open and position multiple windows, instead of doing tiling within the same window.
