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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there is such a thing as perfect UX and I'm not asking for it. I just want them to stop making it worse.

Seriously tho, why isn't this something that a browser can do? Why can't I just split a tab and say all links from the left tab open in the right? Why not be able to scroll through history as a list of such panes like a smalltalk browser or file explorer on a mac? Maybe even a history tree, able to be forked with a click or two. Tree-style tabs are a baby step toward that, but I'm not seeing much interest out there in actually learning how to run.

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Split tabs are now in:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox

Chrome also has split tabs since Feb '26

right click a link, open in split view

KDE's hybrid file / web browser konqueror has had arbitrary tab tiling since 1999 IIRC.. still a gread tool, would just need some love and webextensions support to come back big

I hate that feature and I hate that they keep bloating browser which was lightweight.

Just for the record.

When was Chrome lightweight? 15 years ago?

Didn't it used to be branded as lightweight?

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/google-chrome-birthday/

> I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight

So, yes, 15 years ago.

I also don't understand this feature. Like yo, we heard you like tabs, so we put tabs in your tabs so you can tabulate while you tabulate. Huh?

i occasionally need to compare two tabs. previously that meant that i had to open those two tabs in separate windows and then use window tiling to place them side by side. setting that up was a lot of work. and also it makes switching windows very hard. each side by side view would add two more windows that all need to be cycled through when i switch windows. and don't try to have more than two of those on a workspace. you'll go crazy switching between them.

with the split view it not only becomes very easy, but the split tabs also keep their position among all the other tabs, so i can keep the view permanently without cluttering up my list of windows. currently i have 5 split views in active use. that number is likely to grow...

I think it’s a nice feature. I use it to have designs on one part of the screen and implementation on the other. That way I can jump between “designs | implementation” and “PR | swagger” without managing and resizing tabs. Previously I had to jump between tabs and taking into account the newer screens provide a considerable amount of UI real estate there was screen area to utilize.

I don't understand why browser-makers don't leave window management to the window manager. Split view has been standard in Windows (and probably Linux?) since 2009. I know Mac doesn't really do split windows without additional software, but that's an Apple-being-awkward problem.

just putting windows side by side is not enough. i need to be able to treat those two side by side windows as a unit: see how i use it as an example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913202

no windowmanager anywhere supports that. even tabs could have been solved by window managers. but then we could not get inactive tabs, and the same is true for the tabs in splitview.

if lack of support for inactive tabs are no issue and if you don't use workspaces much, you could use those as a workaround. but that unfortunately at least gnome workspaces are not flexible enough for that. (i'd need dynamic creation of workspaces without automatic destruction, and i'd need gnome to remember which window goes into which workstation. that used to be a feature on some windowmanagers, but i haven't found any that can distinguish multiple windows from the same app.)