[MichaelGG]

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers.

Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.

Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s, and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal. Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the full experience.

Also, the fact that Windows still is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work. It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.

[bambax]

> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.

Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.

[MichaelGG]

Right, which makes Ballmer's "I didn't put great people on the team" history re-write just laughably wrong.

[alex_hitchins]

"Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!

[rconti]

Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally.

It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled windowing differently, it was terrible.

But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature, not on a per-application basis.

Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail, crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).

[tdicola]

If you really want the window manager to handle your browser windows then just open new windows instead of opening tabs. All of your window manager's fancy window switching features, etc. will work.

[tatterdemalion]

I think the problem isn't that tabbed browsing exists, but that window managers are not good enough to handle user experience as well as tabbed browsing does.

[rspeer]

And the fact that tabs exist isn't stopping window managers from getting better at it. They just haven't.

It seems that putting the application in control of its window-switching experience has just worked out better.

[amtab]

Apple has started to embrace tabs within the system, most notably by integrating them into Finder windows in Mavericks. I agree that they should make it a standard type of application and have a standard tab UI that is used in as many apps as possible.

[robotresearcher]

MS has been trying with pen/touch for ages. They had a "Windows for Pen Computing" way back in the 3.1 days. It's not that they have not been trying. The WIMP desktop and app model just doesn't work well with touch. Apple wisely forked the interface because no one has been able to do a single interface that's any good.

[MichaelGG]

MSR had a neat little thing that allowed some sort of "snap to UI element" functionality. That way, targeting a 16x16px thing like "close tab" wouldn't be so difficult.

Or they could have some sort of gesture that lets me go into a high accuracy mode. Or really, anything at all to make it easy to deal with. But nope, your finger becomes the new cursor and that's that.

[bztzt]

Win8 does implement fuzzy touch targeting (looking at the geometry of your entire finger contact region instead of a single point, and picking a best-match UI element) on the desktop. Office 2013 (desktop) also invested in a bunch of touch improvements. It hasn't been enough. (plus, they already tried this approach with touch on win7 and it didn't seem to be working - which, among other reasons, was why they changed tack for win8 in the first place.)

[mikaraento]

A good touch UI is not a good pointer-based UI and vice versa.

A touch UI needs large hit zones, benefits from natural drag/scroll, has only one kind of click but can have multiple touchpoints.

A pointer UI can use very compact and precise interaction areas (text selection is a great example), right- and option-clicks and has very old conventions for drag and scroll.

Saying that Windows is touch unfriendly is missing the point of it being very pointer friendly.

Apple is slowly bringing the two paradigms closer, and people complain at each step.

[alex_hitchins]

I think this is spot on the money.