People say that tabbed browsing (IE7, Firefox et al) is wonderful. Sorry, but it’s crap. I use Windows XP and often have 20+ browser sessions open. Plus assorted PDF files, office documents, etc. I make heavy use of the way that Windows XP groups applications (this can be forced with a registry tweak).
When I want to switch to a particular window, I click on the group on the taskbar, see the full names of the sessions, and then select the required session. Easy. But with tabbed browsing I have to hunt through all the tabs, with their truncated names.
In the beta of IE7 that I tried, if I required a link on a page to open in a new tab, it would do so in a tab immediately to the right of the current one. All well and good, but if I then close the new tab, the focus shifts to the tab to the right again, rather than to the tab to the left, to which I wish to return. Contrast this with non-tabbed behaviour: the new window opens over the top of the old, so when I close it, the old window is right there.
I prefer tabs, but I will sometimes open new window for different types of activities: I might have one window for the SDMB, one for NaNoWriMo, one for funny flickr photos, and so on. Then I have the benefits of the tabs, but I can keep from getting too many tabs on any particular window.
Most links I open nowadays I just open into a new tab; it’s much easier for me to have the reference point there to go back to, rather than hunt again. But, I’m ADD, so I’m not always good at finding which link from the last page I clicked on. Ironically, I don’t usually have trouble keeping tabs on my tabs, and I like not having a pull-down menu on my taskbar.
I suspect Opera has a pretty good system, but it seems to not work for a lot of things. I’m quite happy w/ Mozilla.
The current RC version of Firefox 2.0 has tabbed browsing but also a drop-down list in the right-hand corner of the tab bar listing all tabs (with extended space for the titles). It works in a similar way to the IE taskbar grouping, but within the Firefox window.
One nice extension I’ve found for Firefox allows you to right-click on any tab and either move or copy it to a new Firefox window. Simple but useful.
To be fair, that just means that you hate badly implemented tabbed browsing. In Opera, which first implemented tabbed browsing 10 years ago, tabbed browsing was done right. When you closed a tab, focus went back to the last tab you had been focused on. Firefox managed to get this wrong, too, but there are a half-dozen plugins you can get to fix it.
It routinely boggles my mind that people who develop web browsers have problems implementing a stack for this kind of thing.
FWIW, I don’t like having dozens of separate web page windows open because it makes it harder to find what I want by alt-tabbing.
• I’m on a Mac, and I don’t use the Dock, so no foldertab-thingies in Task Bar or Dock.
• Where other people would open a new tab, I open a new window in the background. (Requirement for any browser app that I use: has to have “Open in new background window” as a contextual menu option). It’s how I browse this board almost exclusively — list of New Posts, go from page to page opening new windows in the background of the interesting ones, then after last page of new posts go read each window in turn.
• If that many windows were open as tabs, there would be so many tabs that each one would read “Strai” or “Straigh” or “St” or whatever — no differentiation. Instead, I go to the Windows menu as need be. Or I Command-` to cycle from window to window in the current app.
I still use tabbed browsing for some things though, so I’m glad its there and I do not hate it by any means.
Given a choice between 20 browser windows open (each consuming system resources) or one browser instance with 20 tabs open, I’ll take the latter. It is a smaller drain on the system.
As for identifying tabs in a browser vs taskbar listing, meh. Different stokes. YMMV.
That type of thing often does have those results and I have heard it is true for some browsers. In short, tabbed browsing has one browser application open with tabs displaying different pages. Twenty browser windows means that the browser application is literally running in 20 separate processes and that takes up a lot of juice.
The first thing I do on any new Windows installation is turn that off. The second thing I do is increase the height of the task bar so I have two rows of applications listed. The application grouping adds two extra clicks (plus “hunt time”) to find the window I want to bring to the front. If I have a need for 20+ browser windows, I can have two browser windows with 10 tabs each all within easy reach and with minimal clutter on the task bar. Sliced bread has nothin’ on that.
I use a Mac, so the whole “taskbar” thing has little to do with me - but I love tabbed browsing. It was confusing at first, when I switched over to Firefox from IE when I was on a PC, but then I downloaded a nifty Firefox plugin that colors the tabs to differentiate them. I like it; I have a photographic memory so I can associate a color with a specific subject, but reassociate a color if I’m doing it some other time. It’s nifty.
However, I can understand why one might not like tabbed browsing. It does get confusing sometimes.
I know I am spoiled with 2 Gigs of memory at home and at work, but I do not notice a major degradation in performance on my wife poor little Laptop with only 512MB. How little memory do you have that you see this problem?
I like using the keyboard to change windows, more than my mouse, so Tab Browsing just holds no appeal to me.
If you devote all that free memory to web browsing, then it isn’t an issue. Throw a few memory hungry apps into the mix and you might be hoping for some more resources. I just tried opening my three Firefox tabs in separate IE windows and IE came out as using 20MB more (70MB vs 90MB). It’s not a big deal for me either, but that’s a non trivial difference if you’re using other big apps.
There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts for tab switching in Firefox, including the ability to select an individual tab (up to 10) with one key press. I assume it’s the same for Opera.
Old Habits, I have been alt-Tabbing since around 1995. I almost never use Ctrl-Tab, but I did not realize that worked within the tab environment. You are the first one to mention it. I am sure I could get use to it. I might survive the IE 7 upgrade after all.
Lemme guess: you have all your windows set to maximize, so you only see one window’s content at a time?
I love tabbed browsing, largely because I don’t like to maximize all my windows, and having 20-some-odd browser windows cluttering up the screen is a major PITA.
If you have 20-some browser windows open, what do you do when you want to close them all? Do you have to click close on each of them individually, or does Windows let you right-click the taskbar group and do a “Close All” or some such?
I’m another that doesn’t particularly “get” the point of tabs. I don’t use them, and when I tried them out, I didn’t find them particularly useful. I do use Firefox, and I prefer it over IE, but tabbed browsing is not the reason.
