With five tabs open in Notepad, since they are placed in the titlebar, there remains only about 1 cm of titlebar by which I can grab the window to drag it around. This area is distinguished only by a short vertical pale grey line like a pipe character, because it's not cool to have a border around any interface element any more apparently. So I often drag a tab off the window by mistake and have to put it back and hunt for the small part that's actually the titlebar.
Then there's the way they put search into a fixed floating window, which when you search upward sits on top of the search result, obscuring it.
I sometimes think I’m the only person in the universe who doesn’t prefer tabs. I already have a way to manage multiple windows worth of content: my OS’s Window Manager. Why would I want every application I run to also implement its own custom window management—visually and functionally inconsistent from every other application’s custom window management?
I feel applications that do tabs are just like applications that do their own custom quirky File-Open dialog even though my OS provides a standard one.
They manage 2 entirely different contexts. When I want to check my mail, I know I just have to go to Firefox and hit the first tab; not cycle through 200 unorganized windows
Some window managers, such as Fluxbox, support "tabbed windows". You can group windows into one "superwindow" and then switch these in a titlebar. Maybe this is what the GP meant?
My number one grievance with Win11. Also, I think it's in the top 3 of all feature requests on Microsoft Feedback by votes. Yet, no movement. It feels so anachronistic to force the waste of space that is a horizontal task bar, in an age of wide (and still widening) screen aspect ratios. Microsoft's UX team is... not good at their job, to put it very mildly.
- notepad with tabs
- shell UI with tabs, VT-100 support and ability to replace the shell
- Paint.net with AI
- even Windbg has massively improved