why do you think MDI is a failed experiment?
OK, that was a bit of an inflamatory stance :-). Let me explain ...
I almost always have multiple windows open. I prefer to Alt-Tab between my most recently used windows and almost never click on a task bar icon/button. The MDI interface breaks that functionality. Instead of thinking "I'll hit Alt-Tab 2 or 3 times until I get to what I want" I have to think "which application window is the document in?", Alt-Tab to that and then think "which client window is it in? and which hot key did the application vendor use for cylcing between open documents?" To make matters worse there is no standard for the hot keys and some applications always cycle through documents rather than using a most recently used stack.
I was under the impression that MDI was a Microsoft 'innovation' - although I'd be happy to be proved wrong. My first encounter with MDI was certainly with MS Word, Excel et al. The reason I say it was a failed experiment is that recent versions of Microsoft Office apps no longer default to MDI and in fact I don't think they even support it any more.
When Opera first came out, my first impression was oh dear thay've used that nasty MDI interface - and they seem to consider it a feature. Surely if MDI was such a good idea, Microsoft as it's principal proponent would have used it in their own browser.
It is certainly true that opening lots of top-level windows chews up icon space on the task bar. Perhaps that is a problem with the task bar rather than the windows - I don't know I don't use it.
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Ah, ok - TMTOWTDI applies in this case as well, I guess. :) I personally don't use hotkeys for switching between tabs at all; rather, I usually ctrl-click on links that I want to follow while still reading through a document, which, combined with Mozilla's ability to load new tabs in the background, works quite nicely and effectively minimizes the time I have to wait to for pages to load - the actual loading is done while I'm still reading the page I came from. :)
Apart from that, I'm not sure who first came up with MDI, but I think I'll side with Dürrenmatt's King Romulus and take what good comes from M$, when there is something good coming from them at all. :) I also can't say that much about Opera; I have used it a couple of times when I had to deal with pages with extremely large tables while working on a slow(er) box, something that Netscape had big problems with back then, and also tried its MDI, but, like you, wasn't happy with it. Various MDIs may not seem that different, but the devil's in the detail.
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mowgli
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