Yes it's a mess, as confirmed by operating system vendors' constant struggle to fix it: Windows, tabs, views, widgets and mini-windows, along with Exposé, virtu

Yes it's a mess, as confirmed by operating system vendors' constant struggle to fix it: Windows, tabs, views, widgets and mini-windows, along with Exposé, virtual desktops and now Stage Manager are all symptoms of the same issue: dealing with unlimited hierachies with limited screen real-estate. An unlimited screen wouldn't really solve much. The real limitation is our working memory – a cognitive problem. Visuals are there to offload working memory, and when you find yourself having three different windows of the same folder, you know visuals has failed at its job. Surely Stage Manager might give us an extra "cognitive percent". Improved visuals, cues, an extra metaphor here and there might give us another percent. But at the end of the day, I think we reached the end of the road unless we rethink the concept of files, folders and the "jurisdiction" of applications. So at some point down the file hierarchy, arbitrary applications take over and visualise the rest of the hierachy in whatever unorthodox, material style of the season. However a browser window is a container and its tabs are locations, i.e. files in some aspect. A bookmark is also a file. The Photoshop pane of Patterns is also files inside a container. And since the hierachy is hijacked by applications, browsers must afford their own ways of sharing content besides the operating systems sharing mechanism. To add to the mess we have Open and Save dialogs, which is just another unneccessary way to visualise the same file hierarchy, with their own means of navigating and creating new folders. My $0.05: Let applications visualise and edit files, and leave the handling of hierachies to the next generation of operating systems. That way the nice patterns in Photoshop could display as a pane in the operating system hierachy since the operating system leaves the rendering to Photoshop (if it's available). Tabs doesn't have to be tabs. They could be displayed as vertical lists or thumbnails, however the content of each tab thumbnail would be rendered by the browser. A container of tabs (really "bookmarks with a state") could easily be moved to another application or browser.