A while back someone on this board posted some priceless advice for web surfing. He/she suggested you right-click on links and choose “Open in New Window,” instead of just left-clicking, thereby losing the current, open page. I’ve been consistantly following this golden advice, but I have two minor complaints that I’m hoping can be solved with a small adjustment to some setting I can’t seem to find.
I’d like the new window to automatically 1. open at maximum (full-screen) size, and 2. I’d like it to open behind the current, open page, not in front of it. Can this be done? If so, how?
Firefox, Opera, and IE-based browsers like MyIE can all do this. Typically, you middle-click on a link and the linked page loads full size in the background without interrupting your browsing. Once you’ve tried it there’s no going back to Internet Explorer, although I imagine that the forthcoming IE7 will have this feature.
I’ve noticed that IE doesn’t seem to remember window size and position when you maximize it (at least this seems to be true of IE6 on Windows XP). The workaround I found was:
Open just one IE window (doesn’t matter what)
Resize it to fill the window by dragging the corners, NOT maximizing using the button
Hi Opal!
Close the window
Now any new window that you open by right-clicking should at least be maximized, even if it’s not hidden.
High on my list of standards for any web browser I’d consider using is that it has to have “Open Link in Background Window” as one of its contextual-menu items.
Meanwhile, the behavior Dervorin describes for IE is pretty much default behavior for all Mac browsers: new windows open to the size of the last window you closed.
What bugs me about this method, is that it’s not maximized, it’s just as big as you can make it WITHOUT maximizing it. When I close a program, I just move the mouse all the way up and to the left and click. If the program is maximized, it’ll closed. If it’s really big but not maximized, it closes the program behind it which is really obnoxious if the program behind it is a website that you googled and don’t remember the seach terms, or something that takes a while to come back up like Quickbooks or Photoshop.
Another option, which you might want to look into, is tabbed browsing. Microsoft claims that IE7 will have tabbed browsing, so if you really love IE you can give it a shot then, or maybe even now, with IE7 RC1 out. I’m running Firefox and when I want to open a link, I just right-click on the link and pick “open in new tab” although there are other ways to do it (like control-click.) I find it much easier to deal with one window and several tabs than several individual windows.
Another technique is to remember that you can use the keyboard to control your programs. It’s not just for typing messages into SDMB.
When I browse the 'Dope table of contents, I right-click an interesting link. But instead of mousing to the “open in new window” menu entry & left-clicking, I just type N Alt-Spacebar X Alt-Tab. The interesting thread opens in a new maximized window behind the table of contents window & the mouse pointer doesn’t move.
With a little practice it takes about 1/2 second to hit all 4 keys; certainly faster than mousing to the “open in new window” menu item. Meanwhile, I’m back in the table of contents page while the new thread page is loading in the background. It just takes a couple of seconds to open each thread & I often have 5 or six downloading at a time, especially when the hamsters are slow.
The Alt-spacebar X and alt-tab commands are provided by Windows itself so they work in any program.
The only reason to use the mouse at all is that it’s the easiest way to pick among the threads; keystroking through a complicated browser page to pick out certain links isn’t real easy.
If those 4 keystrokes are too hard, you can easily install a freeware/shareware keyboard macro program to play back those 4 keystrokes when you pres Alt-Shift-O or whatever.
Where is this middle-click of which you speak? The only middle-click on most mousen these days is the scroll wheel, but scroll-clicking a link doesn’t seem to have any effect in Mozilla or Firefox.
Which would have the astounding advantage of saving one keystroke.
Works for me - I click my mouse wheel all the time. I’d go spare if I couldn’t middle click on links. You may have to examine the button settings for your mouse, and perhaps make sure you’re using the vendor’s installation software. An old Logitech mouse I had came with the mouse wheel click set to something other than “middle mouse button” by default. And if you just plugged it in without installing the Logitech “mouseware”, you couldn’t change it. I believe I sent them an email telling them that their default settings were dumb.
The manual way has 4 distinct strokes, 2 of which are “chords”, totallying 6 keypresses. Some folks find doing multiple shifted/alt/ctrl combos very confusing & hard “alt what then shift who…”. Not me; I do this stuff for a living & have some 6 or 8 chord sequences I can bang out in 3/10ths of a second.
Compare that with using a macro program to reduce the input required to a single chord, which could be as simple as Ctrl-O, ie 2 keypresses. I picked Alt-Shift-O as a more realistic choice so as not to interefre with the built in Alt-O & Shift-O.
The OP was not exactly exuding leet PC skillz, so I wanted to offer a way to make it as simple as possible. I agree that for you or me, making a macro like that would be a waste of effort.