You had a point?

Maybe because it doesn't mean what you think it does.

The Android app lifecycle has no designated end state. Any app in the background can be terminated at any time, and when put in the foreground again is supposed to continue as if it hadn't been. (Chrome breaks that expectation, by opening a new tab if it had been terminated in the meanwhile. So actually, the only way to prevent cluttering it is to not close it - except that doesn't work reliably: Just because it is still in the window switcher doesn't mean it hasn't been terminated.)

I think I did mention that grouping is a good thing, and that window managers don't offer enough in that way.

But I also said that using tabs to do that is limiting.
For example:

The other direction doesn't work, does it. Not an idempotent operation.

A clumsy hack, compared to using a tiling WM.

Why not use a proper graphical database client?

I shudder to think why you thought that is even worth mentioning. I don't want to even imagine a non-parallel multi-user database.

You mean it is broken?
When you say "modal", do you mean your terminal is one of those scripts that keep rewriting the document, including the URL?

I use bookmarks for that. But if you are stuck with a broken script, I can understand how keeping tabs open instead can be necessary.

Netsurf and links2 are graphical web browsers.

Aren't links and Thorium both web browsers? Do they not serve the same MIME type?

Certainly, their goals differ, as links is its own package and not just a set of tweaked build flags for the most resource hungry monster out there.

That's only reasonable. One document, one window.

I don't see how that is an improvement.

But anyway, I was talking about iOS. Android is rarely used as a desktop shell. (I should have been clearer about that.)

The direction differs between different manufacturers. I don't know why so many of them think they have to add their own clutter.
There is also the "close all" button.

The Android application lifecycle has no real end state, at least from the developer perspective, but a stopped app can be killed at any time for any reason. (Basically crash-only termination. That may be confusing if one is used to shutting down programmes by closing the window.)

And most browsers, Chrome included, keep the tabs open when the application is terminated. State is supposed to be preserved, regardless of whether the application is shut down or just put in the background.

Only, Chrome adds a new tab every time it is started. As a user you have no way to tell if Chrome resumes or is started again. (It will remain in the window switcher either way, unless you explicitly remove it.)

As far as I know, the first web browser with tabs was Opera, which was cross-platform. I'm probably wrong about that.

So you are saying that the American government only intervenes after the damage has been done, if at all, and doesn't plan ahead for the requirements that forseeable demographic changes will require?

I'm reminded of Benito Mussolini, who wrote that government should do as little as possible, to act only as a referee between the captains of industry who steer the economy, and to keep the nation at war, while religion takes care of those who are not needed by the economy. (In practice, he didn't live up to his ideals, he was murdered by his own followers.)

Mind, Lao-tsu also said that governance should be done like roasting a fish: not too much. He wrote that it is often enough for a ruler to be there, while the people take care of things, comforted by the knowledge that there is supervision. (He said that about rulers, who are eminently replaceable, but not about the bureucracy that keeps everything running.)

But that doesn't really answer the question. Without laws and regulations, there is nothing to ensure that water is safe to drink, food safe to eat, buildings safe to stay in, streets safe to cross, etc. Is that what the USA are like? I would believe it. Furthermore, without planning for basic supplies, it doesn't matter if the food is safe if there is not enough water to grow crops or no way to deliver the harvest to the consumers. The existence of different styles of government does not explain how government and regulation are different. Is it even a government if it doesn't govern?

Most sites work without JavaScript. Traditonal web design dogma is that if a site doesn't work without JavaScript, it is defective.

Only a few sites don't work without JavaScript. Those also happen to be the sites that draw the most traffic. (No wonder, all that remote code injection must drive traffic through the roof.)

But yes, I've noticed that the number of defective sites keeps increasing. I'm even told that the web interfaces of embedded system require Facebook's React (more like Wrecked TBH). What's the point of building optimised static C code for a small, power-efficient microcontroller when most of what it does is interpret JavaScript anyway? Seems it would be simpler to adapt uClisp for JS. Truly, JS is the new perl.

If you ask Beijing, they do right now.

So you already know that China encompassed both the mainland and Taiwan during the civil war.

After the Xinhai rebellion it was not clear who or what would succeed the Qing dynasty. After the revolution in Wuhan, some opportunists thought they could fill the power vacuum in Nanjing by declaring China a republic, which started the civil war. Consequently, the KMT was declared illegal by the president.

After the president died, the KMT allied with the CCP against the other warlords, and later again against Japan.

After WW2, the allies accepted the KMT as the official government of China. Most Chinese provinces did not. A few years later, the civil war ended. I don't think I need to mention who won.

Today, the KMT is one of eight parties in the Chinese central parliament in Beijing.

For thousands of years we used to think that people having sex in public was normal. Later, smut was invented.

It's not filed under "tech", it's filed under "business" and "United States".

Slashdot is not just tech, it is news for nerds, stuff that matters.

How is it different? Doesn't it mean the exact same thing?

About that

Reinventing thin clients as web interfaces began after the Halloween Memo. Coincidence? I think not.

So the solution would be not to reinvent the disastrous "declutter", but to open Chrome where it was closed, rather than with a new tab as it does.

Yes, crazy. When I switch to another window, I don't want to lose all the files I had open.

Android doesn't have the notion of actually closing an app. It has a back button, which may close a tab or a window, which may or may not end the underlying process group. An app can also be terminated at any time if it is in the background, to free up space for the app in the foreground.

Apple does have the notion of closing an app. It closes the app. When the app is opened again, it should start were it was stopped before, which all the tabs that were open then.

Either way, it doesn't work the way you say it does. In Android, "flipping away" is the same as "closing" the app, and in iOS, closing the app doesn't close the tabs.

The back button doesn't always close the current file, it may go back in the browser history instead, or another tab, or do anything else; but the reason people prefer using the windows button to the back button is because the app they want to switch to is rarely the previous app anyway, plus they may want to keep the file open for reference.

Closing the documents inside an app is as much the responsibility of the user as closing an app is. It's like emtying the trash can folder, or cleaning out the drafts mail folder.

Some web browsers have a button "close all tabs". That may be what you want.

Tabs are just poor window management.

Even on a mobile form factor where fullscreen makes sense, tabs don't.

The idea of a 1:1 correspondence between apps, windows, and processes is misguided. Why shouldn't one app have multiple windows?

Web browsers in particular are glorified document viewers with delusions of being operating systems (although they are more like EMACS than vim nowadays, with the Lisp interpreter and web apps, so there is that), so why shouldn't each page be its own window?

Because of Apple, of course. Because a computer should be as simple to use as a toaster, with one button that does everything. ("Computer, create a recursive algorithm.")

Because that way you can see at a glance if an app is running or not, and close it. (All of its instances at once.)

The Android workflow doesn't even have the closing of an app. It only has going back to the previous activity. But all documents opened with one viewer are in the same window, whether its the PDF viewer, the image viewer, or the HTML viewer. Each app has its one window with all the opened documents. Even though there is no five-finger close gesture.

On the desktop you usually have a bar listing all the windows into documents already, which works the same as a tab bar does. (Chrome has a separate process per tab, which makes sense. Firefox has one process for all its windows, which only makes sense in MS Windows.)

What could be useful is grouping those windows hierarchically. I have yet to see a window manager do that, but there are "extensions" for web browsers that do that. Using tabs does allow grouping pages in windows (and virtual screens allow grouping of windows), which is a rather shallow tree model. Some WMs, like awesomeWM or i3, are more flexible (but you have to make your groups manually).

I won't be surprised when there will be a web app (i.e. "AJAX", probably written in React) for web browsing that implements its own window management.

"Declutter" was also a feature in MS Windows, for unused desktop icons. In effect, it meant that users periodically recreated the same icons over and over again.