>>700
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_window

I guess that may not have been the most precise way of describing what I mean, but the core of what I'm getting at is the assumption that the user can only do one thing at a time, can only look at one window at a time, and so is forbidden from having access to more than any one thing at a time. This might make some sense on a small screen where your only input device is a substantial fraction of the screen's width, and that's about the only place it might make some sense.

You get one window in Discord or Slack, which means everything else you were doing when you decide you want to search is obscured―a pain in the neck if you're trying to compare things, or are referencing something. Switch channels and you might get taken to the source of your most recent notification, but be careful not to switch away before you've caught up or you'll lose your place and you might have to scroll up quite a ways to find it again. The prefs dialog similarly obscures everything entirely until you're done with it. In iTunes, as another example, you can no longer open a playlist in a separate window and compare/manage playlists easily. Why? Because you can't do that on a phone, so why would you do it on a computer? Want to view the album artwork as more than a thumbnail? Say goodbye to the entire rest of the UI. A lot of websites will make it hard to open pages in a new tab, requiring an interruption in flow to access whatever's being linked. If it was in an infinite-scroll column, you have to restart the flow from the beginning because you've now lost your place, and it might be generated differently this time because chronological ordering is apparently lame and for suckers.