Okay, maybe I'm too old to get this, but: What's the great thing about tabbed browsing? Where's the benefit for tabbed browsing over windowed browsing? Xir
I find it easier to switch between tabs than windows. Also, I tend to open a new window for each "topic" I'm looking at, then do tabs within, eg might have one window with threads in bit-tech and one with some pages in wiki. Moving back to a browser without tabs is like the dark ages, you don't know what your missing till you try it.
In IE and Firefox, it is easier (and less resource hungry?) to open up and flick between tabs than to open up another instance of the browser and flick between instances.
I find it quicker to swap back & forth with tabs. OK, you can click on the window title in the task bar, but it could be mixed in with programs. If you don't see it, don't worry. You just have a minor brain defect, is all.
categorise your browsing. i tend to open up a new window when i begin to research something new, and open a tab when i navigate to a new page based on my current research topic. that way i can easily switch between trains of thought, and have automatically grouped relevant pages. also, having a separate recreation window is a decent idea.
It's so that I have to teach my mum how they work every time she rings asking why when she clicks links nothing happens. (They just open in a tab that she doesn't notice. She had about 50 open last time I was round.)
That's your fault for setting her up badly. All tabbed browsers have the ability to focus on a new tab.
I wish my mother could understand the ease of tabs - took me a year to get her to use firefox (I corrupted IE on her pc as an excuse), but whenever I see her at her pc she has a dozen instances of FF running. Mothers and computers just don't go together! Off topic now - I used to have a FF extension that enabled continual scrolling of google searches (the page would scroll instead of having to click next to see the next page) bu it hasn't been updated for FF3 yet - does anybody know of a similar one thats FF3 compatible?
Once you get used to it, it makes it MUCH easier to deal with dozens of open web pages. Open a new window, open some tabs, get distracted by something, leave them for later, open a new window for a immediate tasks, etc.
I prefer it to Windowed browsing as it frees up the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You can have a dozen web pages open, but it only shows you one item on the task bar instead of a dozen, which is just so handy for organising everything on your PC. Also, with tabs, I have a habit of opening ten or twenty pages in quick succession as different tabs, and then looking through each one before closing it and moving onto the next. This forum is a classic example: much quicker to right-click, open (I've set it to new tab by default), every thread I'm insterested in and then look through them one by one, than keep going back to the thread list and clicking on another.
I never use tabs. I like to be able to see what web pages (browser windows) I have open at any point while using the computer. I don't want to have to open a window to find out what tabs I have open.
I just can't stand having 30 instances of firefox open on the taskbar. Having 30 tabs is much more pleasing. Plus the way IE and Firefox are designed, it's more resource efficient to have multiple tabs open than multiple instances.
I tend to come to somewhere like bit-tech, go to "new posts", then open a tab for each thread that interests me. Then I just work through each tab, read, (reply), close. Same on my google homepage (where there's things like slashdot, news, etc), or if I'm reading an article which links off to other places (Damn you Wikipedia!). I find having multiple windows open is a pain in the arse once you get beyond 2 and the OS stacks them into a single task-bar icon like "Mozilla Firefox (2)", and you have to locate the right one before you can switch between them (I don't want to turn off the stacking - it's useful for things like GIMP which think having 50 windows is cool). Plus with multiple windows I find it's easy to open a link thinking "Oh, that looks cool. I'll read that next" then forget about them. I also use two workspaces (additional 'desktops' you can switch between) and find I tend to forget which one I left my various browser windows on if I start opening additional windows There used to be a sweet extension called TabMixPlus which let you force everything in to one window (i.e. it would prevent new windows opening and just make a tab instead), but it hasn't been updated for Firefox 3 yet It could do other stuff too like but a progress bar in the tabs but it was best at making tabs behave.
Several windows wouldn't suit me, I have the browser set to re-open with the last used situation so I can just continue whatever I was doing last session, and (so far) browsers can only handle resurrection of tabs from the last window closed. But tabs are versatile, you can use them (or not) to suit. It's an extra choice in the ice cream flavours of life. You been under a stone since March? http://tmp.garyr.net/
I love the tabs in Chrome. You can 'lift' a tab off to create a new window, which can then obviously have more tabs. I tend to have windows with tabs relevant to each other.
I used to hate tabs till about a year ago. I find its easier to organise my activities when I have a half dozen or more apps open at once. At work its also a god send as the system we use is web based and needs a half dozen windows (or in this case tabs) open, I can also have one browser instance open for utilities that I am using and one for our support system also making things easier.
