For what it's worth, Thunderbird is getting Matrix support and with its age come some of the old-fashioned design choices that might just end up giving you your tabs.
If all else fails, I'm afraid you're going to need to get enough people together to make your own chat UI. Maybe fork some open source messenger and show the world the advantages you're describing, because I don't think many people get the benefits.
That said, Element is very much not an innovative chat client. The federation protocol is what's innovative, the clients range from what look like modified IRC chats to Discord clones. The only areas where Matrix clients are innovative is where they're not being used to chat, as Matrix isn't exclusively a chat protocol.
With most IRC clients or multi protocol chat programs you could have a couple of important channels always visible on a second monitor, key people you DM a lot in a tabbed window somewhere prominent, active chats open next to your work, and everything else in the main app window, minimised.
Now we have a website (wrapped in an app, if we’re lucky) with next to no layout control. It’s nothing short of a disastrous step backwards.
I’m convinced the recent resurgence of the terminal is partly due to the complete abandonment of GUI applications for most forms of professional computing.
We desperately need a new framework for applications:
- offline first
- local first
- data first
- standardised types and APIs
- as composable as the terminal
- standard controls across all apps
- standard window and document model
- web views considered harmful
- UX and “customer journey” designers considered worse
We were nearly there, then “web 2.0” happened
This is true of Element, but you can have a Matrix client with any form you like. There already exist several. So it's not the most compelling criticism here IMO, because those who are using Element have chosen it over other options.
I still feel that my criticism applies to where the money and development effort seem to be focused, even for Matrix, but I am a big fan of Matrix overall and agree that it does at least have a variety of better clients.
It’d be great to see every Slack replaced with a Matrix server for sure.
It's not. If you have several conversations going on at the same time, what's awkward is having to switch between them in the same window.
Is the conversation list on the left side of the window not analogous to tabs? A conversation can be pinned there which would be providing the same experience as keeping a conversation open in a tab.
Nope, they all insist on keeping everything inside a single window. So even if you have thread "for better communication with no noise", it still gets lost in all other threads, and they come up with workarounds like a dedicated page for threads etc.
Just give me tabs, damnit.