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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

It's a cool concept in theory -- I'd always thought I'd like using it.

But in practice, I realize I'm addicted to tabs. When working on 3 documents at once, I want them in separate tabs in the same window -- not 3 different windows.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'm actually at the point where I want things to go in the opposite direction -- just turn all my apps into tabs. (Like Chromebooks, I guess.)

Finder? VLC? Word? Preview? Spotify? Photoshop? My code editor? I just want them (or each document in them) as tabs next to other webpages and/or each other. (For Photoshop and code, I'll probably organize my own window/space for them, but still open up webpages next to my images/code.)

Having tabs and a dock feels redundant in 2020, like two competing paradigms that just need to be refactored into one by now.

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If you use Windows, Stardock has a tool, Groupy (https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/), that allows you make everything a tab.

One of the examples on their website groups all Adobe applications in tabs.

Microsoft also tried to build this into Windows but eventually gave up (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512250/microsoft-window...)

You need a window manager/virtual desktops, not the insecurity doing everything in the browser brings.

Well, to be more specific -- I want the OS itself to be a full-screen tab container with multiple spaces/desktops (and add tiling, and popping out tabs like floating windows, as advanced usage).

And then each tab is an app or app document window. So I could have a Chrome tab next to a Firefox tab if I wanted. Browser tabs would be peers next to other apps.

None of this is about security, or running apps in the browser. Just using tabs as the main concept for everything, rather than windows.

Have you tried i3 on Linux? It’s probably not exactly what you’re thinking of, but you can use it very similarly.

I am using i3 but what bugs me is that tabs now seem to be part of the browsers.

There's no elegant way of telling Firefox to never use tabs, always open a new window. There are some extensions pretending to this, but the experience is terrible. There actually is a new tab created which is then detached.

I don't usually use Chrome, so I looked up wether it handled this, but it seems to rely on extensions too.

Qutebrowser works, but it has other limitations, such as poor extension support.

I've had the exact same experience you described. Realizing i3 is the way to go and apps shouldn't manage tabs themselves - trying to stop Firefox / Chrome from doing so - realizing it's not simple and the no tabs extension is problematic. Trying qutebrowser and giving up because it's limited.

I've settled on NoTabs Firefox with a userChrome.css that hides the tab bar until Firefox someday supports native no tabs.

i3 can do all that and more If you’re willing to switch to Linux or a BSD.

This bugs me too sometimes. It's incongruous that I can stack Gmail, docs, and my company's ticket system nearly into one tabulated window, but I have to use a completely different interface to access a local file browser, RDP, or the sniping tool.

It's funny, my version would probably just put every browser tab into a different window and just use a powerful window manager like i3 to deal with everything.

You're seeking for Dolphin or similar in a container, Guacamole for remote desktop.

These should at least get you pointed right.

Sounds like Ubuntu's Unity to me. My 2 cents: Now that I'm using two 4K panels I very much enjoy having 4 windows side-by-side (optionally even splitting those vertical "columns" horizontally to hold 2 windows). No more task switching, all I need is always visible - I personally wouldn't opt for a tab-based full-screen WM.

What about the other 40 windows?

Using two large monitors is bad for your neck.

I think this is doable today. Just disable tabs completely on Firefox and chrome, and use a window manager that allows you to group windows into tabs (like i3)

For a while, Windows 10 Insider had a feature called Sets[1], which was exactly what you're describing on a system-wide level; it looked like such a boon to personal productivity.

[1]: https://youtu.be/3lEjuU-XFHg

Isn't that effectively what we had with windows circa 1995?

yes, but slower. but hey, it's in the cloud!

PWAs are neat, but have no multi-tab feature that I know of. I put in a feature request trying to inspire the Brave dev team to make some really neat PWA stuff. They can literally do anything they want as long as the future spec doesn't conflict. Super jealous of how fun it would be able to reinvent the web with total freedom.

View/modify PWA manifest on web-app/shortcut export

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/7729

Full screen tab-only was ChromeOS in 2009-2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRPjkiw0dYU

Then they put a fairly conventional window manager and taskbar/dock around those in 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2978163/aura-chrome-os-ha...

I saw something similar on Hackernews a while back that allowed you to group apps together so you could switching seemingly between workflows. So instead of a dock where you group windows by app, you group them by context.

Now I'm starting to think how feasible it would be to embed other desktop apps that people have installed into an electron window or something.

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