Windows 10’s File Explorer was a mess. It had tabs for everything, and it was difficult to navigate. Windows 11 has finally fixed that. Now, when you open a file in File Explorer, there are three tabs: the file itself, the folder where the file is located, and the contents of that folder. This is much better than previous versions of File Explorer which only had one tab for everything.
Microsoft rolled out the Windows 11 22H2 update last month, which was packed with new features, but tabs in the File Explorer and a few other features were delayed until later. The company has confirmed the feature is now rolling out on Windows 11, and it will become fully available with the November 2022 security update. The feature works just as you would expect from using browser tabs — any File Explorer window can now have multiple tabs pointed at different folders.
Mac computers have offered tabs in the file manager (Finder) since 2013, with the release of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and many desktop Linux distributions and third-party file managers included tabs long before that. The first attempt to add a similar feature to the File Explorer was in 2017, when Microsoft was experimenting with a feature called Sets, which allowed different applications (or multiple windows from the same app) to be grouped into a single tabbed window. The Sets feature was shelved in 2019, after Microsoft reportedly received mixed feedback and was running into technical problems getting it to work with Office apps.
It’s great to see tabs finally arrive in the File Explorer, though at this point, Windows is certainly tardy to the party.
Source: Windows Blog
