Comment by j1elo

I think one reason might be something similar (just in spirit, not the concrete concept itself) of another good idea killed by patents, in a whole different domain that was talked about in HN some days ago: mini-games that would appear during the loading screens of the actual game on a console. Bandai-Namco had a patent for that, thus it killed spread in other games.

Maybe both these are cases of good ideas that were there at the right time and place, but lost steam because of patents, and then later the timing was just too late already.

In the case of games, loading screens are nowhere as lengthy as they were when the mini game idea would have been useful. Similarly, the all-tabs paradigm would nowadays be way out of scope for commercial desktop environment makers, who are deeply immersed in a crusade to make simpler and mobile-compatible UIs for their systems, and have been so, slowly but surely, for at least the last decade.

EDIT: albeit if the idea had been around since the 80's, then my reasoning doesn't hold water! 90's was the age of multi-document UIs on Windows, and I'd argue that was the best time the idea had to get some implementations, but I guess it didn't get too much popularity back then either, or maybe Microsoft evaluated and didn't bet on it.