Multiple Document Interface - Comparison With Single Document Interface - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

• Can be tricky to implement on desktops using multiple monitors as the parent window may need to span two or more monitors, hiding sections.
• Virtual desktops cannot be spanned by children of the MDI. However, in some cases, this is solveable by initiating another parent window; this is the case in Opera and Chrome, for example, which allows tabs/child windows to be dragged outside of the parent window to start their own parent window. In other cases, each child window is also a parent window, forming a new, "virtual" MDI .
• MDI can make it more difficult to work with several applications at once, by restricting the ways in which windows from multiple applications can be arranged together without obscuring each other.
• The shared menu might change, which may cause confusion to some users.
• MDI child windows behave differently from those in single document interface applications, requiring users to learn two subtly different windowing concepts. Similarly, the MDI parent window behaves like the desktop in many respects, but has enough differences to confuse some users.
• Deeply nested, branching hierarchies of child windows can be confusing.
• Many window managers have built-in support for manipulating groups of separate windows, which is typically more flexible than MDI in that windows can be grouped and ungrouped arbitrarily. A typical policy is to group automatically windows that belong to the same application. This arguably makes MDI redundant by providing a solution to the same problem.
• Controls and hotkeys learned for the MDI application may not apply to others, whereas with an advanced Window Manager, more behavior and user preference settings are shared across client applications on the same system
• Modularity: An advanced window manager can be upgraded independently of the applications