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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History
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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837730
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:
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.
Thank you.
* group windows in virtual desktop
* search by title
* put side by side
* display fullscreen
* manage shortcuts
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.
And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to move any tab to any edge (top, bottom, left, right) of any window?
And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to group and stack and tile tabbed windows from different applications together?
1997 - tabs first appeared in SimulBrowse
2000 - Opera 4 added tabs
2005 - Opera 8 removed MDI
They tried, maybe MDI is not that good.
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.
Browser tabs is Taskbar:
* Navigation: Ctrl+Tab vs Alt+Tab
* Position: Top vs Screen Edge
* when open a lot both were unmanageable
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.