Tabs … Again (Premium)

Back in the simpler days of the mid-1990s, when Windows was king and native app development was top of mind for developers, Microsoft was actively evolving the platform at a heady pace. With the ultimate aim of moving to an object-oriented system, the software giant first pressed forward with what it called a document-centric interface in which users would focus on the documents that they created rather than the applications they used to do so. But everything was up for grabs, from the presentation of the user experience to basic task navigation to inter-application communications.

Windows 95 was the ultimate expression of this document-centric user interface, and thanks to deep integration with the Microsoft Office 95 applications, users could create new Word documents and Excel spreadsheets right from the Start menu without first opening the relevant application. Indeed, much of the innovation of this era was happening inside of Office instead of Windows. And it was Office that often went to market first with new user interfaces which, if successful, would then be pulled into Windows itself.

Some of these innovations were minor—borderless toolbar buttons, for example—while others, like the ribbon, were revolutionary and even controversial. But in the mid-1990s, Office most obviously established itself as the arbiter of new user interfaces by formally introducing a new concept, called the Multiple Document Interface (MDI), which Microsoft’s developers would race to support for third parties in the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) for Visual C++.

Before this, most Windows applications employed what’s now called a Single Document Interface (SDI) design in which an application could display just a single document—or child window—inside of the main application window frame. So those that needed to open multiple documents at the same time would open multiple instances of the application.

With MDI, applications could optionally host multiple documents—child windows—inside of a single main application window.

Today, this concept is well-understood thanks to web browsers, which are technically MDI applications in which each tab is a child window displaying its own document (a web page). (This is sometimes called a Tabbed Document Interface, or TDI, because the tabs/documents can’t float within the main window.) But web browsers also let you open new documents (web pages) in their own windows. This is desirable because different people work in different ways. Some prefer all of their tabs to be in a single window, while others might prefer having two or more browser windows open.

The big issue with MDI is navigation. Because the Alt + Tab feature in Windows was designed to support individual windows, there was no easy way for users to switch between different documents at the OS level. Instead, they could use Alt + Tab to switch to the application window and then some other navigation system—Ctrl + Tab with browsers and many other applications—to switch between documents (child windows). It is perhaps interesting that Microsoft eventually “solved” this problem, but only for its own web browser, Edge, in Windows 10 and 11 almost two decades later by letting browser tabs participate in Alt + Tab.

But this was confusing in the mid-1990s, as was the debate over how to present this interface to users. Interestingly, tabs were offered up as a solution early on in some apps, and if you look at Excel today, you will see that each sheet in a workbook (spreadsheet/document) is displayed as a tab, with the tab row on the bottom. But Excel itself is now an SDI application again: after going back and forth on MDI and SDI over several years, Microsoft finally reverted the Office applications to their SDI origins. (And navigation remains inconsistent from app to app. You can’t use Ctrl + Tab to switch between Excel sheets in a workbook.)

Indeed, Microsoft walked back from MDI across the board: Windows 95 applications like File Manager were MDI designs that supported multiple file system views in child windows in the same app window, but its more modern replacements did not. Until the latest version of Windows 11, that is, which introduced File Explorer tabs like it was the hot new UI concept of the 21st century.

Of course, those who follow Windows development closely know that Microsoft had been trying to bring tabs to File Explorer—and every other document-based application in Windows—for several years. When Windows 10 was still a going concern, Microsoft announced a feature called Sets, tested it in the Insider Program, and then quietly pulled it, pretending that it had never promised such a thing in the first place. The controversy was unfortunate and easily prevented.

Flash forward to Windows 11 and it’s fair to say that Windows development has gotten a lot less sophisticated and a lot more haphazard. And instead of broad efforts like “tabs all the things” (Sets), we get tabs in just one application, File Explorer. And now, it appears, in a second app, Notepad. Given how slowly this team moves and how little it does of substance, I assume we’ll see this sometime in late 2023, perhaps in Windows 11 version 23H2.

But that’s another issue for another day. The question now, I guess, is why Microsoft would even bother with such a feature addition now. I like the modern UI refresh that it gave Notepad in Windows 11, and I write that as someone who uses this app more than most, and by the way, has written three different Notepad clones of my own. But … it’s Notepad, come on. This is by nature a legacy, utilitarian app. Anyone still using it—and that includes me—can easily handle multiple app windows should we need to open multiple documents at once. Is this really a concern? And where does it end? Does Paint need tabs? What about other apps?

Honestly, I think this says more about the state of Windows development at Microsoft now compared to the mid-1990s, when Windows wasn’t just the center of personal computing but was almost literally all of personal computing. Today, we can only celebrate the crumbs that the current Windows team deigns to give us, but if you’ve been around as long as I have, it’s impossible not to despair at how far the once-mighty have fallen. Adding tabs to Notepad is not weighty stuff. It’s a bonbon, quickly consumed and instantly forgotten. It changes nothing.

But I guess all we can do is take what we’re given. At least those who don’t wish to use multiple tabs in whatever app can continue to open new windows as before.