Tabbed Browsing

For my first post I thought I'd share with you an overview of one of the features of one of my favourite pieces of software - Tabbed Browsing.

Tabbed browsing works by allowing you to open multiple web pages inside the one browser window and then showing you these pages as tabs. By looking at tabs near the top of the browser window you can quickly pick out the individual pages to see which has finished loading and switch between them with a single click (or by using mouse gestures - more on this in a later blog).

Here are a few examples of why useful this is and how it speeds up surfing:

1. When Searching
Tabbed browsing is useful when searching because you often have to open up several pages before you find the information you want. Using conventional browsing this would involve having to go back to your search engine between visiting each link. Using tabbed browsing you can open up all the hopeful links by middle clicking them, and then just work through them one by one without having to keep going back to the search engine to find the next page.

2. When you have a slow connection
Tabbed browsing is extremely useful when you are working on a computer with a slow internet connection. This is because it allows you to load up the other pages you want to visit next in the background while you read another page.

3. When writing a blog and using other pages for reference
Another use of tabbed browsing is how I am using it now to write this blog: I currently have a tab open of the Mozilla Firefox page about tabbed browsing, tabs of several other blogs which I can quickly switch to for inspiration while in the middle of composing this post and also a tab for dictionary.com so I can double check spellings.

4. Opening many pages with one click
An extra feature of Tabbed Browsing in Mozilla Firefox is the ability to open all the pages in one bookmark folder with one click. This is useful because often when I go on the net the first thing I want to do is visit several websites at once and flick through them to read any updates. It is clearly more time consuming to click the bookmark link for each page individually than just to click the 'Open in Tabs' button in the bookmarks folder.