Microsoft Edge Will Soon Let You Split Two Tabs In a Single Window (theverge.com) 45
Microsoft has started testing a new split-screen feature for Edge that lets you compare two tabs side by side. The Verge reports: The feature was first discovered by Leopeva64-2 on Reddit, and it's available in an experimental flag in the beta, dev, and canary versions of Microsoft Edge. Once enabled, a new button appears alongside the address bar that lets you split an Edge window into two separate tabs side by side.
Once you've split existing tabs into a single window, it creates a single tab with the combined webpages. That means you can create multiple split tabs in Edge and navigate through them. You can also pin these side-by-side tabs, duplicate them, or add them to groups just like you would any regular tabs. That makes this feature super useful if you regularly compare documents or webpages.
Once you've split existing tabs into a single window, it creates a single tab with the combined webpages. That means you can create multiple split tabs in Edge and navigate through them. You can also pin these side-by-side tabs, duplicate them, or add them to groups just like you would any regular tabs. That makes this feature super useful if you regularly compare documents or webpages.
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So does every OS. That's not what this is.
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Open one Firefox and one chrome, or one safari. Or two of either. Drag them into the same space. Give one 70% of the screen. How is this any different?
You can't put two virtual desktops side by side to see them at the same time. You can do that with windows (it's their sole purpose); and now, one of those windows may have split content within it, instead of requiring you to carefully arrange two separate windows by hand.
This feature puts MS Windows a tiny step closer to a tiling window manager. Too bad it only works within a single application.
Re: Mac OS (Score:1)
I don't know what the purpose of this feature is when you could just split the tabs into separate browser windows.
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Because when they are in the same window, you can move the arrangement of them both together. Duh.
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Yes, that's what this is. It's the browser-as-OS discovering that multiple windows are useful. So we're up to around 1990? Next they're going to let you resize and move each side of your split tab around. Maybe have more than two. The wonders of modern technology!
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Just wait until they figure out that clicking should not raise overlapping windows so they are useful too and you don't have to use tiling. This was figured out for X in about 1983, but then because of Windows this knowledge was lost around 1990 and since then Linux (or Gnome) has become actively hostile to the idea and refuses to make it work.
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Maybe or maybe not. Maybe it's more about being a klutz or having a tendency to "twiddle your thumbs" with stuff. How do you feel about mouse gestures? I had a laptop that came with those pre-installed, and within the first few days I tracked down the setting to turn it off, as it did nothing I couldn't do some other way, and I kept accidentally triggering them. Same deal with radio controls on my steering wheel, except I can't turn those off. Fortunately, I only accidentally change stations a few time
And yet (Score:2)
They still won't, or can't, fix the download issue. Download a file and either it never completes, or it completes and when you close Edge it tells you it's not finished downloading a file.
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They still won't, or can't, fix the download issue. Download a file and either it never completes, or it completes and when you close Edge it tells you it's not finished downloading a file.
They'll get to that riiiight after they finish fixing their nightmare of a printing subsystem that's so old it still defaults to loading drivers from A:\
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the file finishes downloading and only occasionally on closing the last tab does Edge think it's still in process, at least for me.
vivaldi (Score:2)
Re:vivaldi (Score:4, Informative)
Opera did it in 1994-ish. Same developers of course.
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and of course chrome has a plugin that does that already ...
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I don't think that was the same. As I remember, Opera used to use an MDI type interface so you could have multiple documents open in the Opera window side by side (or however you wanted).
Looking at the gif in the article, this ties two pages to a single tab. So you can have one tab that's just a regular single page, and then the second tab that will always contain two different pages. Like an online test and wikipedia side-by-side :)
I guess I can see how that could be useful but just having two browser wind
My life will never be the same (Score:2)
Will this feature also bring World Peace if I frequently use it to compare my Facebook page with my Instagram page at the same time?
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No, but two tabs at once means twice as many Microsoft ads. So good news for you if you hold a lot of Microsoft stock, bad news if you're just a consumer.
YMMV, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
That makes this feature super useful if you regularly compare documents or webpages.
While I have compared two Word documents (in Word), a few times in my life, I have literally never wanted to do that in a browser -- and why would you compare two different webpages? But, to each their own I guess...
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Re:YMMV, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox has had a plugin for this for the longest time. Extremely handy if you are punching in data from one system and have to look at another. Or, if you keep jumping between tabs when working on an issue. It also makes a lot more sense when you run a browser full screen on man ultrawide.
What was cool in the Firefox plugin was that you could even tile them. I would have web UIs up for systems when doing video production technical direction. Run a 3x3 grid of tabs in one Firefox window. GOLD.
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My employer requires us to use multiple intranet applications, for which it is very common to paste between tabs. I am constantly swapping between windows because our WfH solution doesn't support multiple monitors.
Windows 11 does have some form of tiling windows via Windows+arrow key but I should probably re-visit emacs if it supports embedding a Chromium-compatible browser engine!
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Perhaps one web page is an archived web page and the second is the current webpage. After all, sometimes people just edit, add or remove things to the current web page and hope no one notices.
Perhaps you thought some feature was in a product you bought, you remember seeing it on the web page but you don't see it anymore. You bring up the archived version and compare, etc.
Same goes for things like clickwrap agreements and such. Maybe you'd like to know if they chan
Why do I always think ... (Score:2)
Twice the ad's (Score:2)
You can do that with Windows 3.11 (Score:2)
Wtf do we need a browser to do window management when Windows itself will do that just fine? Or xfce in my case.
Microsoft re-invents MDI? (Score:2)
Cool!
What's the point? (Score:2)
Some retro window management for Gen Z (Score:2)
Which as a fan of MDI I heartily applaud and hopefully someone will (or perhaps has and I am just ignorant of it) create a true MDI browser that instead of just tabs lets you have multiple resizable, overlap-able pages within the MDI frame that you can collapse and restore at will.
It is one of the primary reasons I stick with my ancient text editor PFE32 (Programmers File Editor).
Windows (Score:2)
It's called Windows because you arrange your windows. Taskbar also served as a tab, until they combined it, now it's just a popout tab per application.