I’ve been a Firefox user for quite some time but never understood the attraction of tabbed browsing. What’s the difference if my browser sessions appear as tabs across the top of my screen instead of buttons in my taskbar? Can someone convince me of the benefits of tabbed browsing?
One benefit is that in IE, each instance of it being open can consume some meg-resources. That is bad from a computer resource perspective.
I don’t know how bad FireFox is about that.
Truth be told, I use FireFox and I rarely use tabbed browsing. When I do however, I find it neater and I usually have my taskbar full anyway. I like the feature. I just can’t break old habits.
For one, I usually have many other programs open at the same time, and my many browser windows would have to share the space in the taskbar with the programs. I usually have at least 3-5 different programs running, and sometimes as many as 20 web pages up, so there is not enough room in the task bar.
Also when I want to close my browser windows, I just click the little X on the tab, instead of right-click, close on the taskbar button. It saves a bit of time and effort. And I can more easily switch back and forth between pages within the same program, instead of having to pull up and down different open versions of Explorer to see different pages. These little things add up.
I also just prefer it asthetically. It’s just more convenient to me.
I use Netscape, and I can never ever go back to non-tabbed browsing. At work I have several websites that I like to keep open and tabbed browsing lets me do that without having several windows open in my taskbar. Very convienent.
Resources and convenience are the big reasons to me (ctrl-tabbing to get through tabs, whereas alt-tab includes any other programs as well). There’s also other features, such as having your bookmark tooldar contain subfolders, which can contain a series of links to be all opened at once with the ‘open in tabs’ button. And ‘bookmark all tabs’.
Oh, and middle-clicking to open & close tabs is much faster once you’re used to it.
Out of curiosity, when you say ‘each instance’ do you mean ‘each window’(/taskbar button) or ‘each process’?? Because different IE windows can still run on the same windows process.
If you spawn a new IE window with file-new or ‘open in new window’ when right-clicking on a link, it stays in the same process. This is more efficient, I think, than clicking on your IE shortcut again to start a new iexplore process.
I mean each process. Even though I work in IT, I am bad about spawning multiple ones in IT and I assume that many other people do the same.
For me, the main advantage is that it doesn’t clutter the task bar. Also, I can organize the open web pages by having multiple FireFox windows open, and multiple tabs open in each window. So I may have one FireFox window with my basic “housekeeping” sites open (Gmail, eBay, banking, etc), another window with a dozen SDMB pages open, etc.
It really takes a different approach to web browsing to take advantage of tabbled browsers. When I need to do some Googling on a new topic, I’ve learnd to open a new window, do a web search, then go through the search results doing a Ctrl-Click (“open link in new tab”) on all the links that look interesting. Some of them would take a long time to load, but they will have loaded by the time I’ve looked at the other ones.
Among other things, I use tabs to browse this site more efficiently. I have a “primary” tab with the forum thread list, and I middle-click the threads I’m interested in, which makes them load in new tabs in the background. I start the primary tab loading the next forum list, then go to the threads I opened. I’m almost never waiting a thread to load (which I guess was more of an issue in days past, when the board was much slower).
Yep this is the one reason I switched to tabbed-browsing (and Firefox). Before it I would SHIFT+Click on every interesting thread in the forum and ALT+TAB immediately to the forum index. Now I just middle-click.
There are some added advantages of course… Each tab has the site’s favicon (the little site logos you see next to the entries in IE’s bookmarks) so you can more easily see which tab is from which site; You can “group” tabs in a windows if you have too many of them (say, all SDMB tabs in a windows and all job-related tabs in another); You can order tabs (drag to position);
Nowadays I’ve come to prefer previewing links in a new tab instead of clicking and going back… But I guess that’s just me being a tab-aholic.
If you set the tabs to load in the background, you can open in a new tab and not have the new tab take precedence on the screen.
I’ve started using Firefox and I don’t see the bid advantage, either. You’re just clicking in a different location. Big deal.
This, absolutely. My technique is a little different, though. I have a saved window setup so I can load all the forums with one click. Then I tab between them. Load a thread in the Cafe tab, tab over to GQ and load one there, and then switch back to the Cafe, where my thread is finished loading.
Another big benefit of having tabbed browsing is the ability to quickly organize your windows. Say you’ve got three interrelated windows open, and find yourself switching back-and-forth between windows as you read them. Just press SF6 (in Opera) and all your ducks are in a row.
I also like that if I’m obsessing over something and have thirty windows open, and then decide it’s time to go to bed, I can just shut down, and when I restart my browser the next day I can opt to pick up exactly where I left off, instead of finding those thirty pages again.
Because I tend to have 493049304 windows open at once when I’m online, and it’s just easier to manage. Oh, and if you really want to get tab-happy, try Trillian for tabbed chatting (as well as the convenience of only having one program instead of AIM and ICQ and Yahoo! and MSN messenger and…).
Although I primarily use Firefox at home, I use IE at work and you can get tabbed browsing if you install the Yahoo! Toolbar (which I find invaluable).
What is this “middle click” of which you speak?
It makes a difference if you typically have a lot of browser windows and applications open. Right now I have five browser windows open, Photoshop, Thunderbird, two directories, a TV window, and a VNC client. Everything is still nicely organized and one click away. I don’t want five extra windows cluttering up my task bar. If they were all on the same bar the only one I’d be able to identify without clicking on is the one that uses a unique favicon.
Either a three-button mouse, or a scroll wheel which doubles up as a button. The latter is very very useful - I can scroll through a whole page of search results, opening every link I want into new background tabs, by only using the scroll wheel.
I lurve me some tabbed browsing. I have a few windows open, and when I open up the good old (new and shiny) Internets Explorer, I open a few tabs and check my email, work email, the Dope, and my fantasy sports page. I poke amongst them when there’s down time. Also, if I need to reference something else, I just hit minimize and they all go hide. I used to have the “show desktop” shortcut on my taskbar, but it’s not on this computer (and I don’t even know how I got it there in the first place), which I dig as well.
Often, when I explore a site with multiple links to other sites, I want the original site to remain open - this site I don’t have to have refresh itself like it does if I simple click it. As I keep it on the original tab, the links load without interfering with the site.