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Comment by divan | Hacker News Reader

Why people still buying the concept of tabs?

Tabs make sense for document viewers. Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. They are full-fledged virtual machines for apps (only those that can be written in JS and use typesetting engine as a UI platform - which is nuts, but okay).

The point is, web apps, like normal apps, require proper window manager. Why the hell I should not be able to switch to app when popup alert is shown in another app? Why I can't put two apps side by side inside this VM? Why can't I switch between web apps opened in browser in a similar way as in KDE, Windows or MacOS (Stage Manager type switching would be great).

There so much space for experimentation here. But no, we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.

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App vs document is a false dichotomy. I don't know about your usage, but I tend to have a small handful of open tabs that are on the app end of the spectrum (chat, email, audio/video, that's about it), a magnitude more tabs that are on the document end (documentation, blog posts, news articles) and the same magnitude that are in-between (shopping, project management stuff, hacker news).

The app tabs are the ones that profit the least from the hypertext paradigm; other tabs tend to spawn new sub tabs which are more or less short lived. I use tree style tabs to manage that.

It's easy enough to use my actual window manager to manage the app style tabs, by putting them in their own window. But for the most part, this hasn't been necessary. The Firefox popout video player has been more useful than I would have thought, though.

> App vs document is a false dichotomy.

Could you support this with arguments?

There are websites that are very much like an app, like Gmail or Slack. 20 years ago, most people used standalone applications for these.

Other websites are not app-like at all: Wikipedia articles, blogs like substack, API documentation; these are documents. And they still make up a significant portion of my browsing -- so yes, my browser is still a hypertext viewer. YMMV, like I said, maybe you mostly have apps open; I don't.

And many websites are in-between: project management tools like JIRA and shopping websites like Amazon are document-based (tickets, product pages), but offer actions on top of those documents, like an app would have. They also have external links like, you know, hypertext.

And the latter is true for even the app-iest of apps, which makes it useful to have them in the browser (for the same reason, some desktop apps end up embedding browsers). And conversely, even the document websites have actions that are more or less central to the experience, e.g. Wikipedia has editing, blogs have comments.

So there isn't a clear line between app and document, that's a false dichotomy.

Thank you, but I have to disagree here.

Yes, it's true that sometimes the line between document and app is blurred. But I would argue it's blurred exactly because we use things designed for document to make apps.

Take "links" for example. In web apps, practically every action item is a "link" - either a "<a href=" or <button " that opens another link. But it's not because these things are links - it's because there is no other option to do it without links. If all is you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. In a normal app (made in a UI framework designed for that, and not in hypertext engine), instead of links you would use events or function calls or some similar concept.

Likewise, "external" links. You can open external links from normal apps. You don't need to make app a HTML page for that.

So it's not a false dichotomy. If you have ever used desktop/tablet/mobile apps that have blog/comments functionality, you unlikely to think about those screens and functionality "as a document". No, it's just another screen of the app, that renders pixels and handles user input. You only think about it as a document when everything you have is "HTML documents".

I totally think that slate star codex blog post I read is a document, even though there is an app-like comment function I don't use. And I totally think Wikipedia is a bunch of documents, even though there is an app-like edit functionality that I rarely access. And I totally think Google is a service for (among other things) looking up recipes, which I think are documents, even though they sometimes have an app-like button to re-calculate serving size.

On the flipside, I think Whatsapp Web is an app and not a document, even though I know that it's implemented in what was traditionally a document framework.

Wikipedia is definitely a good example of interlinked documents, indeed. Blog is probably too (editing blog is entirely different process, though, and needs an app — you wouldn’t call Adobe Acrobat “a document” )

What I’m trying to say that it’s hard to draw the line between documents and apps if all you have is a tabbed document viewer and you forced to build apps on a document typesetting engine.

You can do most of this stuff by popping the tabs into separate windows.

Is it really a better solution to have a window manager in an app that's already in an OS with its own window manager?

Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years. But I don't know about a full-on window manager.

Probably separate windows for the tabs deserving to be promoted to apps and a tiling window manager would achieve what GP wants. We have comments here on HN praising i3.

https://i3wm.org/

However the always open tabs I work with most of the time work better in full screen mode on my 15" laptop. Sentry, TeamCity, YouTrack, Bitbucket, AWS (more than one tab), Google Cloud Console, the web apps I'm working on. Little space for tiling.

> Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years.

Firefox had this as an addon before Quantum. I used it often, even with a tiling window manager, because the tab tiles didn't have their own toolbars/etc - it saved a lot of space. Its modern replacement isn't very useful, it just arranges multiple windows into tiles, each with their own toolbars/etc.

I use Panorama Tab Groups to group tabs by project. When I click on a tab group the browser window only shows the tabs in that group. Selecting a different tab group swaps in the other set of tabs. It lets me have understandable groups of 10-20 tabs per project/subject.

Every feature of the OS will eventually be re-implemented in the browser. It will be slower and less convenient to use.

Nobody's preventing you from popping out tabs into separate windows. In fact, for a while KWin allowed you to tab any windows.. sadly that feature seems to have been lost somewhere around the Plasma 4 -> Plasma 5 transition...

Well, in the early 00's when Firefox was starting to become a thing and it introduced the usage of tabs, it really mattered whether something was a local app or something that's primarily the contents of another server fetched and displayed/processed on your computer. It was useful to think of the browser be the "Internet remote window".

Now, since basically everything is an Internet app, perhaps the distinction between local and remote isn't too important anymore for most people.

As a backend software engineer, most long-running terminals on my machine are are often remote connections, and I don't tend to use tabs there (and like to tile them with tmux).

Sounds like the the browser could behave much the same way for me.

TL;DR: I agree.

> Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore.

I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.

> we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.

Browsers do both web apps and documents (and honestly, blur the lines between them all of the time).

Also, I for one wholeheartedly want tabs for both of those use cases (and I don't think I am by any means alone in wanting that).

> I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.

There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.

Here are tabs I have open at the moment:

   - HN (board app, not a document)
   - Soma.fm DefCon radion (music streaming app, not a document)
   - Facebook (social network app, not a document)
   - Eurosport Player (video player, not a document)
   - research paper (PDF, document, but not HTML)
   - another forum (board app, not a document)
   - Canva (graphics editing app, not a document)
   - Miro (whiteboard app, not a document)

So you're disagreeing that those apps are apps and not the documents?

> There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades.

As someone who does web development, and has been doing it for longer than the last couple of decades, that statement seems unnecessarily dismissive.

> But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.

While I would agree that the quantity of web pages people visit today that are 'apps' is substantially larger than it used to be, I do think there are a lot more plain HTML documents in use (particularly in boring corporate environments) than many who frequent HN would think.

Of course, if you are going to call anything that executes a significant amount of Javascript an 'app', I am not sure I'm interested in the argument.

My original response wasn't arguing about what was most common anyway -- you said "Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore." I was just pointing out that they still do a lot of that (and for things that I would not consider to be an 'app'). Admittedly the line between 'app' and 'document' is a bit fuzzy in some cases, but there are enough cases where (in my mind) it is not fuzzy that I still don't see your original comment as accurate.

Yes, you can both run apps and open documents. What I'm saying is that "tabbed interface" makes tons of sense for documents, and not so much for the apps. But browsers keep pretending that all apps are documents and deserve to be put in tabs.

I disagree that the tabbed interface makes no sense for apps. I think that's a matter of personal preference.

> another forum

What's the forum?

Some Flarum forum software I run, why?

The vast majority of my tabs are actually documents.

Yep. It's definitely both.

What's stopping you from opening separate browser windows?

(I remember browsers before tabs. It was awful.)

Nothing. That wasn't my question.

Why does the browser need a window manager then? You can run each "app" in its own window.

There are niche operating systems (it was posted on HN but I can't remember the name now) that consider application windows and tabs as being one and equal; you can even have one window that has tabs from different applications.

I mean "tabs" is just one of many forms of hanlding multiple windows. They make a lot of sense for document viewers and alike. My claim is that browsers are so much bloa..^Wbigger that that. There is no reason to limit web apps to that document viewers type of window handling.

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