Comment by nonethewiser

The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved. Often I have 6 virtual desktops, and maybe 5 Firefox windows and maybe a Chrome and an Edge (testing and the occasional app that doesn’t work with Firefox, a problem made worse by my employer forcing us to use the ESR) and those all have tabs. Not to mention various IDEs and distraction generators like Slack and Outlook that have enough urgent and important content that I can’t just get rid of them.

Adding a new kind of window or tab has the potential of organizing some little bit of this universe at the expense of there being more things to look at globally, I badly want to be able to hit a button and see not just the windows I have open but all the tabs and that counts browser tabs but also IDE tabs and ideally these sort of sub windows inside of browser UIs.

Reminds me of the startup I worked at where somebody got up at each standup meeting and said “we can’t find anything in the N different places (Slack, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs, …) places stuff could be so we need to add N+1 places.” For a while I pushed back against this obvious fallacy but nobody else did and management would approve another monthly subscription…. Until at some point the investors pushed back in the disorganization and added the distraction of OKRs and people thought “maybe we need a subscription to some service that reminds us to cancel subscriptions we don’t use”. One ring that would rule them all never seriously considered, I guess people didn’t actually expect “enterprise search” to actually work.