[ronjouch]

I for one consider separate windows a nuisance. I like the new consolidated "all in one" UI, just like I liked when browsers moved to tabs.

Honest question: what's the added value of separate windows (to be precise, separating contact list from discussions) to you?

[clinta]

I consider it a nuisance. I have a good window manager (i3). It can tab or stack windows however I please, and I can navigate through my tabs of windows with the same keybindings across my OS. When browsers decided to force tabs on everyone, suddenly the keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere else no longer work in the browser.

Same goes for various chat apps that don't open conversations or buddy lists in new windows. Even vim, as much as I like it, frustrates me I can't open views to a buffer in separate X windows, no I must split windows in vim.

Window management is a bolt on feature to these apps and none of them do it as well as the window manager I'm already running.

I wish Windows and OSX had implemented OS wide tabbed windows a long time ago, then maybe these application developers wouldn't have felt it necessary to add these features inside the apps.

[Vexs]

A big thing (for me anyway) is that the overall interface becomes smaller, and allows for greater customization. I can set it up exactly how I want, and at what size, without messing about. Sure, you can do that in a single-panel application, but skype is never gonna do it. It's kind of like how photoshop is better with floating windows.

[ronjouch]

Got it about the customization. But while it has a benefit to you as a probable "power user", it has a cost: beginners don't get it. They don't understand why part of skype is in a windows while another lives in another. When widgets are dockable/undockable, they undock by mistake, lose the undocked widget in some unseen corner of their screen, are unable to reattach it, and get frustrated.

"All-in-one" UIs allow for less customizability/rearranging, but IMHO that's a trade-off they do for one huge benefit: simplicity.

With this in mind, how do developers decide which direction to push? By looking at their target user base, of course. And the target user base of Skype is not mostly savvy professionals who like to rearrange windows/widgets, it's humans wanting to talk to other humans. So Skype developers naturally push towards simplifying.

Other examples of applications who are kinda, in various ways, reducing such customizability:

- Office, with the Ribbon: no more detachable toolbars.

- All iOS / Android apps: single-screen, one thing focused at a time (with the exception of left/right tiling in recent iOSes)

- Even the GIMP introduced a Single Window mode in recent versions.

Now, why don't Skype developers let users pick whether to choose single or multi-window mode? (which they used to do in the Qt-based version under Windows, see the "View" menu).

- Because configurability means more code, more tests, more bugs, more money. So if only a tiny part of the userbase requires the configurability, product managers bring the hatchet.

- And again, options means beginners will accidentally change them to the one that doesn't fit them, won't understand what the hell happened and how to change it back, ending up either grudgingly accommodating to the undesired option, or getting frustrated and leaving.

[Vexs]

Fair points- I largely don't have an issue with single-window interfaces, (see discord) but it kinda sucks to have your nice, multiwindow taken away and replaced with something much, much worse.

[Roboprog]

Sadly, I think I got it: progress = market saturation = dumbing it down.

Idiocracy, in action. :-)