I’ve been running Windows 11 for a long time and have seen many changes over time, but something that strikes me is the inconsistency in behaviour between applications.
Something that Win11 did really well, was to finally resolve the mess that was Settings, something that had been disjointed since the metro move in Windows 8, which was slightly improved in Windows 8.1, again improved in Windows 10, but only with Windows 11 felt like it was consistent and designed by 1 person, rather than a committee.
My pain point with Windows 11 is now an inconsistency between how applications work.
If you have multiple tabs open (like everyone does) and you’d like to view them side-by-side, you can simply click on the tab and tear it off from the current application windows (Chrome, Edge, Firefox etc) and it creates an application window of its own you can position side-by-side (thanks to Windows Snap, or PowerToys).
What’s strange is that Windows 11’s new tabbed Explorer interface works differently and you can’t do the same thing.
In Windows 11, File Explorer supports multiple tabs, allowing you to browse to a location to copy from, start a new tab and browse to where you want to pass the file and go ahead. When you want to compare files in a folder and see them side-by-side, you have to work around this issue.
The only option is to use Windows key + E to launch a second Windows Explorer window, but this leaves you with the task of manually navigating to the same location you already had open, an unnecessary waste of time.
So please Microsoft, please be consistent in multi-tab behaviour, it even works as expected in the Mutli-tab Notepad, so why not Windows Explorer?
I think you just hit Ctrl N and a new window pops up in the same location. Bounce each to the side to split the view and hey presto, side by side windows…