Split view

Two to four pages at once, built out of ordinary tabs

A split is not a special container. It is a window arrangement showing two to four of your ordinary tabs at once, and exactly one of them is focused. The focused tab owns the omnibar, the title, back and forward, find, and every keyboard shortcut.

Two Wikipedia articles side by side in a split, the right pane outlined as focused — Two ordinary tabs, side by side. The outlined pane is the focused tab and owns the omnibar.

Things to try

about 5 minutes

01Shift-click another tab in the sidebar.It appears beside the current one. The two tabs gather next to each other in the sidebar, which is a real reorder, not a temporary grouping.
02Add a third and a fourth.Three tabs sit in columns. Four make a 2x2 grid.
03Drag the divider between panes.
04Option-click a link on a page.⌥ClickIt opens as a pane beside the page you were reading rather than replacing it or hiding in a background tab.
05Trigger a site that opens a popup window, like a sign-in flow.The popup opens as a pane beside the tab that opened it. At four panes it just takes focus instead.
06Drag one split member above another in the sidebar.Sidebar order is pane order. Dragging a non-member into the block does not join it to the split.
07Click any tab that is not in the split.The split dissolves back to a single view and the tabs stay where they gathered. Shift-click a shown tab to drop just that pane.
08Close the whole set at once.⇧⌘WInside a research workspace the same keys close the workspace instead. Those two meanings never coexist.

Worth filming

Mail beside a calendar is the honest use case. Option-clicking a link into a pane is the one that changes how you read.