I, too, don’t like the “tabs everywhere” craze that instated on GUADEC, but since this can be turned off easily: go for it! I’ll disable it right away.

When GNOME 2.0 was released, I didn’t like it. I was used to GNOME 1.4 and all of its bells and whistles. Time passed and I realized how much cleaner layouts are the way to go. And, currently, GNOME brings both power and simplicity.

Even the KDE guys, who were so “let’s add a button for everything”, are changing their minds — which is nice, because they have great apps that I don’t use because GNOME made me feel different about interface clutter.

But… tabs everywhere? The UI Hall of Shame is unfortunately down ATM, but their chapter on tabs is fantastic and worth a read. I truly hope that GNOME don’t turn into a tab hell like most of its examples.

In theory you are right, and MDI is bad. However, since web browsers introduced this, many people are used to the behavior and want their applications to behave like that - at least that was my feeling. What we do is always a mixture out of what we want, what the usability experts want, and what our users want.

Note that you can always unset a GConf key and everything will be as before, i.e. no tabs / MDI windows.

As soon as there is a convincing platform solution for displaying multiple windows/slots/documents in a common window with a common toolbar, we can adapt to it.

However, we have to provide satisfying solutions today and tomorrow, and not the day after tomorrow.

Best regards,
Christian Neumair