I get this with browsers and also with Office programs Word and Excel.
I see the difference, a new window will appear on the task switching bar and a tab will appear on the tab bar. For Word and Excel, the new document can have it’s own window or just be on the Window pull-down.
Do I care which one I use? Does one method soak up more memory or slow my work?
For browsers it really doesn’t matter, use whatever you prefer. I like tabbed browsing because it prevents my task bar from getting cluttered.
Edit: Windowed browsing is useful when you want to resize the windows individually so you can have more than one on screen at once.
In general, new tab uses less of your computer resources than a new window.
A tab is just another thread running inside the browser task; a new window is a new task that the operating system has to start, service, and keep track of. And the operating system will allocate memory for this new task, a time slice for it, etc. A new tab shares the memory already allocated to the browser, which only requests more when needed.
The benefit of using a tab rather than a window used to be significant, it may not be as great an advantage any more. Programmers have recognized that people commonly have several websites open at once, and have tuned the programs for this. So now, using a new tab rather than a new window may only save a smaller amount of resources.
This seems to depend on the browser. Google Chrome uses tabs but each tab shows in the task manager as a separate task, on the other hand Firefox is shown as one task.
I would be interested in learning how to open a new document tab in Word 2007 such that the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen has only one Word box, which corresponds to multiple documents available under View|Switch Windows.
Likewise for Excel.
As 1920 said, I believe a new window increases memory usage much more than new tabs. As for myself, 90% of the time I use new tabs unless I REALLY want to change what I’m doing. For instance if I want to research something but don’t want to lose my 13 Dope threads I have over at the moment I will open a new window and come back to this instance later.
Organize things however you prefer. You aren’t going to notice the small bit of extra memory that a second window might use.