Pinned tabs and Split-Screen

Since widescreen format in monitors gets more and more common, how about a twist to the classic tabbed windows UI?

Imagine being able to pin a tab and have it move to a side-view area in the same window. That are would keep the pinned tabs separated from the rest using a splitter / split-view UI. The pinned pages area could also be configurable by user to be at left or right or even at top or bottom of the window. It could maybe even be dragable to dock to the wished for side of the window or to make the pinned pages area float as a separate window (that one can even move to another display if they have multiple monitors attached) if we wish to have maximum flexibility.

That way for example in a web browser that uses tabbed navigation, when you would click on a link that would open in a new tab (as requested by the respective anchor tag in the HTML page, or as configured in browser settings for all links that don’t specify a target, or as overridden by the user using SHIFT+click or right click and “Open in a new tab” action), if the page you were at was pinned, the new tab would open at the non-pinned tabs area on the side and you would keep having both the page you were reading visible and the new page visible at the same time to check it out.

Such a design would be very handy when you want to checkout a news stream like that in Twitter, Facebook etc. without opening and closing or navigation between tabs all the time.

So how about some browser maker or plugin author to go for it? Feel free to give just the due credit for the idea if nobody else has come up with this before.