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>People understand browser tabs

My anecdata suggests they don't. I have tried teaching normal people how tabs work, but I might as well be speaking pig latin.

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Is there a pinworm outbreak in your neck of the woods? All of these concepts (MDI / Tabs) easily fly with anyone we deal with on a daily basis.

All I can tell you is that when normal people don't understand windows, you definitely are not going to get them to understand windows in windows (which is what tabs effectively are).

I hate all these simplified designs we see in computers now just like most of the other weird people here, but those designs are not for a lack of good reasons.

They don't on phones because there they are hidden away and you have to know about them. I've seen relatives' phones with hundreds of tabs open simply because they had no idea mobile browsers do that by default.

But on desktop, tabs are plainly visible all the time and it's very easy to discover how they work.

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