Saving the Best for Last: Tabbed Browsing

This is the feature that sells most users on Firefox, even if they're not concerned about security and don't appreciate its fast, clear rendering of almost all Web sites. It's one of those features that's easier to explain with a video than with text and screenshots, so we'll just touch on it here and leave the rest for the video treatment.

Here's a view of NewsForge.com, scrolled partway down the main page. Several headlines are visible.

The NewsForge main page (partial view).

You see several interesting headlines. Instead of just clicking them one by one to open them, right-click the first one instead. This brings up a little menu.

The Link menu.

If you choose the Open Link in New Tab selection, you open the story "Review: Fedora Core 4" in a new tab.

Two tabs are open.

The magic here is that not only can you go on reading the first pagescrolling up and down all you wantwhile the second page loads, but you can click on to the newly-opened page, read it, and return to the first page right where you left off instead of reopening it.

You can open multiple pages at once, until the tab bar on top of the browser window is so covered with tabs that you can't read the words in any of them.

This is a great convenience, not only when you're reading stories on a news Web site but also when you're doing research with a search engine or comparing a number of items on an ecommerce vendor's site side by side.

Many tabs open, with some still loading.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 7 is supposed to have a feature similar to Firefox's tabbed browsing when it comes out, but as of this writing I haven't seen it. Not only that, in the summer of 2005 Microsoft still wasn't sure if IE 7 would be fully compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for browser displays, while Firefox already met W3C specifications.