Yeah, that's what I mean. OS vendors have almost completely stagnated on UI design for nearly 20 years now.
Mozilla popularized tabbed browsing back in 2003. OS X Leopard released stacks in the dock in 2007. I'm much more of a Windows user, but I had to look up that it had taskbar grouping all the way back to Windows XP in 2001, so I don't think it was enabled by default, because I really don't recall using it until Windows 7 in 2009.
What was it about tabbed browsing that was so much better than MDI? We've had MDI available for app developers since as long as I can remember. I don't know if it was in Win3.1, but I do know I used it in Win95. I think tabbed browsing is a key linchpin in this issue because I think it created an inflection point in how many open documents a user could expect to manage with ease. Before tabs, I don't think a lot of people tried to run more than a handful of apps with multiple windows at the same time, even with MDI. Nowadays, it's not unheard of to see someone completing about their browser crashing and taking it dozens, if not low-hundreds of tabs.
So there is a huge window here that feels like the two most popular desktop OSes couldn't be counted on by cross-platform app developers to provide a good means to manage dozens of documents in working space, because their vendors just kinda sat on their hands. "You want TDI? We have MDI at home." Ooooh, transparency effects on windows. That's really improving workflow /s
Honestly, stacks and taskbar groups aren't that good. Are they kind of junk because it's inherently impossible to do at the OS level? I don't think that makes sense; it's a pretty high level abstraction. It seems much more likely that folks at Microsoft and Apple just didn't feel any pressure to dramatically improve UX. We didn't get the first major, single-page-like web apps until round about 2005, but I don't think it really took off until 2008: smartphones giving people Internet access on the go, the popularity of the iPhone giving mindshare back to Apple so they might become a desktop contender again, and the desire by many developers to never have to ever ever ever touch Java Swing again. What real innovation and proliferation have we seen in desktop OS window managers since then?
So I'm imagining an alternate universe where OS vendors didn't cede control of UI R&D to browser vendors.
Mozilla popularized tabbed browsing back in 2003. OS X Leopard released stacks in the dock in 2007. I'm much more of a Windows user, but I had to look up that it had taskbar grouping all the way back to Windows XP in 2001, so I don't think it was enabled by default, because I really don't recall using it until Windows 7 in 2009.
What was it about tabbed browsing that was so much better than MDI? We've had MDI available for app developers since as long as I can remember. I don't know if it was in Win3.1, but I do know I used it in Win95. I think tabbed browsing is a key linchpin in this issue because I think it created an inflection point in how many open documents a user could expect to manage with ease. Before tabs, I don't think a lot of people tried to run more than a handful of apps with multiple windows at the same time, even with MDI. Nowadays, it's not unheard of to see someone completing about their browser crashing and taking it dozens, if not low-hundreds of tabs.
So there is a huge window here that feels like the two most popular desktop OSes couldn't be counted on by cross-platform app developers to provide a good means to manage dozens of documents in working space, because their vendors just kinda sat on their hands. "You want TDI? We have MDI at home." Ooooh, transparency effects on windows. That's really improving workflow /s
Honestly, stacks and taskbar groups aren't that good. Are they kind of junk because it's inherently impossible to do at the OS level? I don't think that makes sense; it's a pretty high level abstraction. It seems much more likely that folks at Microsoft and Apple just didn't feel any pressure to dramatically improve UX. We didn't get the first major, single-page-like web apps until round about 2005, but I don't think it really took off until 2008: smartphones giving people Internet access on the go, the popularity of the iPhone giving mindshare back to Apple so they might become a desktop contender again, and the desire by many developers to never have to ever ever ever touch Java Swing again. What real innovation and proliferation have we seen in desktop OS window managers since then?
So I'm imagining an alternate universe where OS vendors didn't cede control of UI R&D to browser vendors.