They are pretty old hat, really. I think Opera added them as a standard feature in 2000 or something, and MDI wasn’t new then. And I too can’t cope with non-tabbed browsers - once you get into the habit of having 8-20 webpages, 2-3 spreadsheets, 2-3 other documents, 5-10 Notes emails all open at once, the Windows taskbar is just about adequate to get the right application. Having every single item in it’s own window :eek:
Also the latest version have this nifty feature where you can mouse over the tab and see a mini preview of the webpage, which is sometimes handy. And you can reorder tabs by dragging them about to put related pages next to each other, which is far superior to windows brain-dead grouping-in-random-order approach.
One thing I don’t like about tabs is that I don’t know if you can open up two pages at the same time and compare them side-by-side. I often find myself wanting to do this and don’t know how to do it with tabs - is it possible to do this in Firefox, or is it one advantage that windows do have over tabbing?
In Opera, you right-click on a tab, and then you have a few arrangement options.
Right-click –> Arrange –> Tile horizontally produces this. You can then save your arrangement as a session and restore from it later. I find this useful for research applications. (Eg; translation engine on a sidebar, etc.) I don’t think there’s a way you can do that with windows.
I know you can do it in Opera; I don’t know if you can in Firefox. But in any case, you aren’t restricted to tabbed browsing only. You can open several Firefox windows and have one or more tabbed pages open in each of them. So you can have the benefits of both styles of browsing. Firefox, IE and Opera all have the following shortcuts:
Ctl-T to open a new tab in the current window.
Ctl-N to open a new window.
Yeah, that’s what I do now. The times when I need to compare two windows side-by-side are rare enough that it’s not a big issue at all when it comes up. I was just pointing out one advantage windows seem to have over tabs (and wondering if I was just missing something obvious).
I rarely have more than two or three browser windows open anyway, I’m probably not the target audience for tabs to begin with. I can definitely see how they might help you organize twenty or so web pages.
I hate a cluttered taskbar (it’s bad enough with the individual programs I have to run) and detest the grouping of similar programs (ie when you have 5 IE windows open, you have one ‘program’ on the taskbar that you have to click on to get the pop up list of the 5 windows).
Hell, I already have my taskbar on the right side of my screen at work because of how many things I have to have open*; I barely dealt without tabs. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Mozilla Phoenix; going to an IE6-only workplace was torture.
Thank God we upgraded to IE7, though I wish we could use Firefox, dammit.
(At all times: Outlook, our ticket tracking software, our main proprietary software, my dept’s IT research/resource page (including various websites I have to log into to do some work function), our active directory taskpad to check network user accounts, our software to track IT status change requests, a “recreational” IE window, Windows Messenger with various chat windows and our security question-verification look up. This isn’t including the other 15 or so programs that I can open/need to use at any time, but usually don’t need to every single day).
Tabbed application interfaces have been around since at least the late 80s (introduced with emacs, I think) and an earlier poster was right in saying that Opera was one of the first, if not the first, browser that had a tabbed interface in 2000. Seven to eight years is forever in internet terms, so it’s hardly “NEW NEW NEW.” Heck, that’s only 4–6 years after internet access became widespread.
I’ve used tabs to follow links from a main page, to allow a page to load in the background while I keep reading the first one, and to keep clutter down. For example, here I’ll open a new window for each forum and use tabs to open topics in that forum. If I read an article and I want some background, I’ll open a new tab attached to that window and run a search, opening up several pages with relevant information from that search. Everything related is all together in the same window.
I also have tons of stuff open at the same time. Right now, for example, I’ve got 10 MPSIMS tabs open in this window, a Wikipedia window open in the background, and 8 other windows with probably a few tabs apiece minimized in my dock. I’ve probably got about 30–40 pages open at any one time. That would create terrible clutter if it weren’t for tabs.
I do the trick with opening a set of tabs too. I do online banking for most of my US financial stuff, so I have a bookmark tab that has all my bank URLs in it. Safari (my main browser) will open a set of bookmarks in tabs, so I can have all those sites loaded with two clicks.
That’s strange… I’m on a Mac too using Safari. According to the window, this page is called “Straight Dope Message Board - I STILL don’t see what the big deal is about ‘tabbed browsing’” but the tab somehow magically knows to call itself “I STILL…”. It is also smart enough to not include any “the” in the beginning of a title. The “the” seems fairly easy but I’m not sure how it knows not to include the “SMDB” part.
As for the OP, it’s much easier, if you tend to have a lot of windows open, to have tabs. If you just have 2 or 3 open it doesn’t matter. But for someone like me, who probably has 2 or 3 browser windows open, each with 20 or 30 tabs, having all that in the start bar would be unmanageable. With tabs, they are automatically handy in the window I want, in an order that makes sense.
See… here’s the thing with tabs and MeanJoe. They don’t work the way I logically think they should.
Example: Firefox v 2.0.0.13. Under Options | Tabs I have “New pages should be opened in: a new tab” selected. So when I launch Firefox, it opens my default home page (msnbc.com) in a single tab. I then left-click on a link to an article I would like to read. The article opens in the same window, not a separate tab. The only way I can get it to open in a separate tab is to right-click on the link and select the menu option to open it in a separate tab.
Likewise, if I have msnbc.com open in the only open tab and I click on one of my bookmarks in the Bookmarks toolbar, it opens in the same window replacing msnbc.com. To me, since this is a new link/page it should open in a new tab based upon my settings auto-magically.
This. Makes. No. Sense.
Thus, I have not used tabs because they do not work the way I want to work. Although, from reading everyone else’s responses here, this maybe due to operator error.
Are you are clicking on a link which would normally be followed within the same browser instance if you were viewing it in eg IE6? It’s not a link that would spawn a new window in IE6 (using the ‘target’ tag or whatever in HTML)?
In that instance, I think it’s not actually a New Page as far as the browser is concerned, it’s sort of the old page but with some new content in it. Or something :dubious: It’s far from clear. Personally I think the dialog should say something like “Open pages that that try to pop open another window in a new tab instead? Yes/No”.
