I grew up fascinated by projects like GNUStep, Haiku, Etoile, Wine, and ReactOS. Engineering feats, all of them. They reverse-engineer or reimplement entire operating system APIs so that software written for one platform can run on another. And they almost always end up in the same place: impressive technically, starved for contributors, forever chasing a moving target they can never quite catch.

I never liked the state of the Linux desktop either. Not because it’s bad per se, but because it’s fragmented. A KDE app on GNOME looks alien. Firefox rolls its own everything. GTK and Qt will never agree on anything. Every toolkit draws its own widgets, manages its own text rendering, handles its own accessibility story. The result is a desktop that feels like a coalition of independent projects rather than a coherent system.

Every browser has tabs. Linear, flat, disposable. Open thirty of them researching one topic and they sit in a row with no indication that twelve of them came from the same Wikipedia article. Close the wrong one and the context is gone.

Tree is a macOS browser that replaces tabs with a tree. Every page knows its parent. Cmd+Click a link and it becomes a child node of the current page. The sidebar shows the full hierarchy: research paths branch naturally, and you can always trace back to where you started.