I want a browser that can tile windows easily

[WebWeWantBot]

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title: I want a browser that can tile windows easily
date: 2022-02-02T18:37:15.440Z
submitter: Anthony Lannutti
number: 61facf5b98a1dc00b71375ad
tags: [ ]
discussion: https://github.com/WebWeWant/webwewant.fyi/discussions/
status: [ discussing || in-progress || complete ]
related:

• title:
  url:
  type: [ article || explainer || draft || spec || note || discussion ]

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If i need to view multiple windiws in a browser for multitasking i have to resize them. It would be nice if there was a tile vertical or horizontal option in a deoo down menu that would automatically tile and resize various windows rather than me manually resizing windows.

Maybe it has this feature but i cant find it in many browsers.

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If posted, this will appear at https://webwewant.fyi/wants/61facf5b98a1dc00b71375ad/

[bradisbell]

I love this request, as it demonstrates the brokenness of tabbed browsing.

Before tabbed browsing, we could let our window managers put windows wherever they wanted. Seeing what was open was no problem, at least for those of us with decent window managers (i.e., Windows/explorer.exe). Switching between the web and any other application was seamless. Alt+Tab worked like you'd think it would. Everything would be grouped, or not, on a task bar like users would expect.

People thought this was a good idea, since web browsing often requires lots of windows. Macs didn't have something useful like the task bar. So, browser implementers exported this useful UI feature to them and everybody by way of tabbed browsing. This was the first significant erosion of the line between the browser UI and what was provided/specified by the OS and its norms.

Nowadays, the browser does all kinds of things. Overriding window styles, changing how simple context menus work (looking at you Chrome... right-click menus open the wrong way), changing simple mouseover behavior, altering simple input boxes, abandoning standard navigation (like backspace to go back).

It's unfortunate, because now doing something as simple as tiling your windows requires herculean efforts rather than a simple right-click -> tile which would have worked 30 years ago.

This comment is a bit of a rant, but hopefully this illustrates the underlying problem... that browsers have become UI monoliths, which can harm the user experience just as much as it purports to help.