OS window managers do a better job of that. Split view inside the browser has some thorny issues around making sure the user knows what resource they are interacting with. There is a lot of complexity when it comes to focus/blur in HTML, CSS, JS, etc.

The cat was out of the bag, when browsers got tabs. They are already tiny window managers, and may as well lean into it.

No they’re not.

Tabs are tabs, they’re not windows. Next thing you tell me is that they should implement virtual desktops and loading tabs remotely.

They are already tiny window managers, and may as well lean into it.

Tabs state management is simpler and more battle tested. Split pane browsers will need to relearn some of the same problems/security found when tabed browsing was introduced. They will have unique problems/security as well. I would be interested to see how split pane browsers deal with focus stealing JS especially with timeouts or other shenanigans.

Unpopular opinion: Tab management in browsers originally addressed the shortcomings of OS window management (see Windows XP and IE6, and the original Google Chrome tiling capability replicated into Windows 10/11 OS window management.

I also share this opinion. I think we are in a local maximum with tabs. But getting out of it request a lot of coordination between browsers and each desktop environment so it is unlikely to ever happen. Maybe less portable browsers like GNOME Web or Safari that only "need" to deal with one desktop environment can manage it at some point.

https://kevincox.ca/2021/01/11/tabs-were-a-mistake/

I regularly use 'split-view' with Firefox with the aid of a window manager, PaperWM (which is a horizontal scrolling WM for GNOME) to be exact. Just drag the tab out of the tab bar and the newly created window is automatically tiled to a sort of 'split-view' right next to the original one.

Yeah was about to say - i3 solves this as well, and does so in a general way rather than each app having its own split pane implementation.

Sometimes I want two browser session side by side. Sometimes I want a browser session next to Gimp or my IDE. Sometimes I want a 3-row terminal with that thing I’m keeping an eye on just below the browser.

i3 to the rescue!

On a Mac I use Rectangle Pro for something similar, snapping my windows next to each other. It's not perfect but it does allow multiple sets of tabs at once.

I use yabai on Mac, coming from AwesomeWM on Linux. Never tried Rectangle, any idea how it compares?

It's not a window manager, but a tool for doing various things to windows triggered by hotkeys.

Why not just do that with your window manager??

Arc browser does this, you should check that out

And it also as vertical tabs! Just checked out Arc. Very innovative design. I guess it's inspired by mobile browsers.

Seems to me that Arc is inspired by Operating Systems in general.

- Workspaces/Desktops with mouse gestures - Spotlight like Quick Launch - Alt Tab like Tab switch - Window management within the browser - Dedicated area for Media control - Widgets on mouse hover

Might as well go all the way, the browser is basically an OS anyway on top of your OS anyway

You can also group tabs in the vertical view but also create separate „workspaces“ (to distinquish between different projects or even private <> work).

Though the most innovative feauture is their deep integration of services like Notion, GitHub, telegram etc.

Quite astonishing actually and definitely one of my favourite pieces of software.

Haha, Arc requires an account to use, wtf?

Floorp, a Firefox fork, has this feature.

Try Vivaldi, it has something like that

Yep, can tile as many sites as you want inside one tab.

Edge has this, though I have no idea why you wouldn't just open a second window...

The mode that opens all links from one pane in the other pane is useful at times, and wouldn't really be achievable with just separate windows

I do this all the time by just dragging a tab off so it's a second window (and hitting a key in my wm to make them side-by-side). The only problem is that the address bar turns so tiny it's impossible to read it among all the pointless icons that should've been in the overflow menu, I wish there were a way to make it prioritise showing the url instead of icons for "bookmark this page" and "certified by digicert" etc.

yeah, this with a tiling window manager is my go to.

Yeah, widescreen monitors lend themselves nicely to a split pane view and I wish more applications used it.

You can support feature requests on Mozilla Connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab...

The Arc browser (macOS and Windows) has exactly that feature

This is better accomplished by adding keyboard shortcuts to the browser for popping out a tab into a separate window, and then you can use the window manager’s shortcuts to arrange side-by-side, or however you want.

It’s preferable to have such building blocks of functionality, which one can then combine in many ways.

Vivaldi does this also.

You can try Arc, it does that.

I'm a little confused why your current solution of letting your window manager handle this is insufficient? I'll often have two or more windows of a browser open to have "paned" browsing.

Vivaldi has that . Helpful for comparison, charts etc

Very simple in Firefox (tested in Firefox 60.4.0.esr - any later check toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets etc.):

- use userChrome.css to display ALL tabs side by side:

profile/chrome/userChrome.css :

  tabpanels {
    display: -moz-box !important;
  }

  tabpanels > notificationbox {
    -moz-box-flex: 1;
    border-width: 2px !important;
    border:solid #888;
  }

- with extension like last_selected_tab AFAIR, or your own, to have content-secondary, handled - then hide any browser of other type with styles as well (as by default you have only: tabpanels > notificationbox > browser[type=content-primary] - being the active tab). :)

Edge does that

Back in the XUL days there was an addon that did this. And it wasn't just two, I'm pretty sure you could split arbitrarily deep, both horizontal and vertical.

We lost a lot when they abandoned that.

Use a tiling window manager and you can put anything side by side.

I find the tab paradigm very deficient, though. I used to think tabs were great (like everyone), until I learnt Emacs. Emacs doesn't have tabs. You can just open anything in any window at any time and split windows arbitrarily, even in text mode over SSH. It's so much better. Having each tab limited to some viewport is so unnecessarily limiting.

Edge has this, and vertical tabs too.

I miss Edge. I might still be using it if it wasn't for uBlock Origin and Manifest v3.

Opera had a very mature & expressive implementation of this feature back before version 15 (when they adopted Chromium). Since then, Vivaldi (created by Opera founder) is trying to rebuild all of the OG Opera features - they have this feature now; not as powerful as it once was but they're working on it.

Vivaldi has split pane. I use that if I need it.

I'd like to be able to open a link in a new pane, split with the current tab, just as I'm able to open a link in a new tab or a new window.