Microsoft announced plans in 2017 to bring a new feature to Windows 10 called Sets. It was going to basically bring support for tabs to the user interface — you know how you can open multiple tabs in a web browser and flip between them without opening a new window? Imagine that… but with the ability to group tabs for multiple apps in a single window.
For example you could create a Set with an Office document, a few web pages open in the Edge web browser, and a few locations in Windows Explorer.
At least that was the idea. But despite showing up in several Windows Insider Preview builds last year, it looks like Sets is dead.
Over the weekend, Microsoft senior product manager Rich Turner mentioned on Twitter that “the Shell-provided tab experience is no more,” but that the company is working to add support for tabs to PowerShell (which, I suppose, could mean it’ll be coming to other programs on a per-app basis).
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley says her sources at Microsoft confirm that Sets is dead. Apparently the feature wasn’t very popular with testers, and Microsoft determined it wasn’t worth the extra work it would require to make Sets work.
Meanwhile folks who are looking for another way to group multiple apps together as if they were browser tabs for a single app do have another option: Stardock’s Groupy is a $5 app that provides similar functionality. And it’s actually been available since before Sets was even announced.
via Neowin
Sets was mostly a good idea but with terrible execution. A new tab should always open an instance of the same application instead of a browser tab. It was a ruse to get people to use Edge.