In 2017, Microsoft officials provided a preview of two new features coming to Windows 10: Timeline and Sets. Timeline made it into Windows 10 as part of the April 2018 Update, but Sets didn’t. And it’s looking like it never will be included in Windows 10.
My sources say Microsoft dropped plans for Sets, a Windows-management feature, which would have allowed users to group app data, websites and other information in tabs, months ago. Although Microsoft did test Sets last year with some of its Windows Insider testers, the feature generally wasn’t well received or understood. For apps like Office to work well with Sets, the Office engineering team was going to have to do a lot of extra work.
Too bad, because this really looked like a useful feature to easily group related windows into single objects.
I’m still waiting for tabs in the file explorer.
This seems to be more suitable for a natively tabbed environment, like haiku.
In fact, over there it´ s called Stack&Tile, a feature that can be traced back to a suggestion from 2005 in their forums, where it was called fusing tabs. ^_^
I came here to toot the horn of Haiku too. Sure, it’s implementation isn’t “smart”, but my god is it powerful
Giveth, taketh… I’ve used TidyTabs before, it’s a bit of a hack, but does make one’s life easier. Oh well.
This is one of those features that looks like it would be simple to implement and, indeed, in a more standardized environment where window management is rather uniform, it would be. MacOS, for example, could implement this fairly easily. Windows, however, because of the sheer number of window management libraries, APIs, and related quirks, is much more difficult. Even virtual desktops (which are easier from a coding point of view) still don’t always work quite right in Windows and apps don’t interact with them the way you’d expect sometimes. To group windows into tabs when the windowing libraries used are not only unaware of tabs, but might actually preempt the tabbed window management features, is orders of magnitude more difficult.
I used a tabbing window manager for a very long time. Named Fluxbox, it’s kinda like Openbox with tabs. I really enjoyed the tabbing, especially as you could tab any windows you liked together and applications didn’t need to explicitely support it.
It was a pretty obvious feature but still didn’t find a wide adoption amongst window managers.
Now we are in the age of tiling window managers, where grouping windows together into one frame is a given core functionality. They work even better for me. Very rarely do I need windows to sit on top of others (e.g. tool windows or dialog windows), so why not get assistance from your window manager in arranging your windows next to each other?
In general I find it fascinating how far mainstream desktop systems are lagging behind in adopting concepts of intelligent window management, namely:
* Tabbing/grouping
* Tiling
* Virtual desktops
* Activities (grouping of virtual desktops with suspend/restore)
The good thing with Windows 10 is that it finally has virtual desktops.
Win+Tab for those who didn’t find this feature before.
I’d settle for Windows simply remembering which monitor my windows were on before the computer went to sleep, the way macOS has done for years. They don’t even have functional basics, and they are talking about this feature no one will use. Typical Microsoft.
And that’s why it was dropped. Office is a bigger asset and more important than Windows in the marketplace these days. They’ll make the OS team bend over backwards to accomodate Office team needs (look at the files on demand stuff having support added directly into NTFS itself) but not so much the other way around