If there's one often-overlooked feature in Windows that I really enjoy using, it's the "Cascade all windows" feature for the taskbar.

I've been told -- unprovoked, so you know it's bad -- that I tend to have a lot of windows open when I'm working. It's true. I do. And when it's time to clean them all up, it's nice not to have to declare "windows management bankruptcy" and close everything I have open in an app before closing it out.

To dodge this, you can hold down shift as you right-click a taskbar icon, and select the option from this menu:

Well, often you can do this and quickly go through whatever the app has open. What Chrome does is less than particularly helpful.

It's hard to see there, but you can't read any window titles other than the very first one. You can click the image to make it full-sized. What's displayed sort of gives you an idea of how much you're going to have to sift though, but it's otherwise not insanely helpful.

Here it is, up close.

I can tell my order has shipped in the front window, and how many tabs I have open in the other five, but that's it. Done.

Look at what Edge does.

It's a little hard to see the details in the picture, but you can get a feeling of how absolutely beautiful (and by "beautiful", like any good engineer, I mean "practical" and "useful") that is. I can see every window, every tab, every title. Now I can quickly hit the X at the top right to close any window I'm done using & that needs to go away.

Here's what Edge shows when "cascaded", zoomed in.

Being a good resident

Edge gets Windows. You might say you're not surprised, but what is surprising is how badly Chrome flubs it. I mean, I understand the, "They even use Material Design on iOS, man!" argument, but I'm not buying that doing so requires that you be a bad Windows resident.

Edge looks distinctly different from Internet Explorer, for instance. You've got plenty of leeway before you lose your design language, so to speak. And even though Apple, for instance, completely ignored all the good Windows resident requests with iTunes and WinSafari, two wrongs don't make a right.

In short, it's not that hard to push the titles up into all of that dead white space in Chrome.

Why not use that for displaying real information, even if there wasn't the option to cascade windows? And since there is, well, let's just say that it's a horribly efficient, beautiful thing when the title bar/browser tabs are done right.

Labels: chrome, coding, design, edge, fail, style, windows