Windows 10 will reportedly get tabbed windows

April 14, 2017

MSPU’s concept design of how the new tabbed experience will look based on Microsoft’s internal concepts

Windows 10 is getting a much-awaited feature sometime soon. The new feature will take things a step further in terms of you how use windows and it’s a really big deal for Microsoft, to say the least.

Redmond is working on a new “Tabbed Shell” for Windows 10, according to a new report from Windows Central. MSPU can confirm that Redmond is indeed working on a new tabbed experience for Windows 10 that will possibly arrive with Redstone 3 or Redstone 4.

So what’s the purpose of the upcoming Tabbed Shell in Windows 10? The new Tabbed Shell in Windows 10 will essentially add tabs to windows. Yes, you heard that right: Windows is finally getting native support for tabs in apps. The new tabbed experience in Windows 10 will work across all the different apps – this includes the classic Win32 apps, the Universal Windows Platform apps, and even the Win32 apps on the Windows Store.

Concept designed by MSPU based on internal Microsoft concepts

The new tabbed experience in Windows 10 will allow users to create different tabs for an app in Windows 10. For instance, if you are working on a document in Word 2016, you can create a new tab for another file and copy something from that document into the main document you’re working on.

Another scenario where the tabbed experience is going to be useful is obviously the File Explorer: for instance, you can open your Downloads folder in one tab and open any other folder or directory on another. Tabs on the File Explorer is something users have been wanting for a long while now, and the new Tabbed Shell will do exactly that.

According to my sources, the new tabbed experience won’t work seamlessly from the get go and developers will need to optimize their apps for the tabbed experience to work nicely on their apps. The optimization will essentially make sure that the tabbed experience doesn’t show multiple window controls when enabled, and developers can make other changes if they want.

It is possible Microsoft will show off the new tabbed experience at Build 2017 next month, which is when we will get a closer look at some of the other big new features coming with the Windows 10 Redstone 3 update. The new tabbed experience is going to be huge for Windows 10, and it’ll radically change how we use Windows now.