IE7 Tabs

[andychev]

OK this has annoyed me enough to write about it and see if others feel the same.

I have read on many occasions how great people think tabs are in web browsers and how Microsoft have stollen the idea from other browsers and how its about time IE had them etc etc etc.

Well, i have had IE7 installed now for a couple of weeks and before someone thinks this is a dig at IE7 it isnt it is a general moan about Tabs, they are rubbish! Perhaps i am missing the point with them but after trying again and again to utilise them i go back to using seperate windows for what i am doing.

My reasons for thinking they are rubbish are several fold. The first reason is you cant tell which tabs are open in which IE window. So if you have two IE windows open with several tabs and you go and check your e-mail in outlook then you cant just look on the taskbar to see which window you need as it only shows the current tab.

The second thing also linked to this is that the same applies when you goto close an IE window, you cant see which tabs are open so could be closing a page you need.

Thirdly and perhaps the most important point, surely the task bar exists for the same reason that tabs exist? and they are both trying to do the same thing but in my opinion the task bar does a far better job of it.

I would love to hear other peoples views on this....

Is it possible to get rid of Tabs? and get an old style IE6 skin on IE7? (call me mad if you wish!)

[Angie]

To be honest it doesn't really bother me, it is something that I use but don't think twice about. I suppose I am used to using the tab functions and as a result I don't know any better.

[Matt]

Quite honestly I used to hate them until I was forced into them by Firefox and IE and basically every other browser around now.

However I find myself using it more and more as the days pass. It comes in very handy for me when I need to look at a customer's trouble ticket, their billing info, and various other browser windows regarding the specific client. As it turns out I can more easily manage multiple clients easier if I dedicated one browser with several tabs to a particular individual's needs. When they are done I close the main window and look at another user's issues.

Its great for multi-tasking especially when you have to wait for 3rd party sites to load that are slow, I can hit up the other customer's dedicated window and start loading pages in there while I wait for the other client's pages to finish up.

Overall I find them helpful more than a hindrance. When I first started using them though, I was very clumsy and inefficient.

Now go get yourself another monitor or two and you will really appreciate tabs because those dedicated browsers I was talking about can fill up each screen. That's when they become extremely helpful for me.

I have a Windows addon that allows the taskbar to be spanned across all monitors which works excellent for my purposes in a multi-monitor environment. I guess it all depends on how you compute!

Hopefully you will find them useful one day.

[Matt]

Is it possible to get rid of Tabs? and get an old style IE6 skin on IE7? (call me mad if you wish!)

I was just playing around in "tools > internet options" and low and behold, there are tab options, including one for "enable tabbed browsing" which looks to me like you can turn them off.

[Ricardo]

I have IE7 on my laptop, but I haven't really gotten into tabs. I often have two or three browsers open instead.

I'm still slugging away with IE6 on my desktop.

[jmarcv]

Andy.

I hear you, and for the exact reasons you mentioned. I can't tell where anything is anymore. I have used tabs in Firefox, and they 'appear' to be useful, but the taskbar is where the problem is. Group similar feature gives you a dropdown aof all the pages. Great feature, in theory, but I forgot why I ended up trashing that. There was something half-baked.
Now if tabbing could somehow tap into that (mouseover taskbar shows all open pages for that instance of browser), great. But it doesn't.
One Matts meat is another mans poison. I have 2 monitors, 4 desktops, too many projects. I might have a good 20 pages open. Flipping between desktops still requires me to move browsers to the focus. Just seems like a longer process.
But as for closing a window by mistake, there is a warning. If you don't read the tabs.... well.....

As for your request, here's how I did it (g)
http://www.howtogeek.com:80/howto/wi...et-explorer-7/

[Matt]

Now if tabbing could somehow tap into that (mouseover taskbar shows all open pages for that instance of browser), great. But it doesn't.

Ahh but it does. Look in the tab bar on the very left you will see an icon that looks like a window. (Gotta have multiple tabs open for it to appear) then click that little bugger.

[jmarcv]

Yeah, nice (yawn) but I can just look at the tabs and see. The point here was the TASKbar, not the tab bar.

This is like my bank explaining that my balance alerts don't come in email, I have to log in, and on my main screen, which has all my balances, I need to press 'alerts' th see that there is an alert about my balances.

OLE TORRE!!!!

[jmarcv]

...Ahh but it does...

Actually, I suppose I can see where this would be useful with about 4,723 tabs open. But obviously the API doesn't seem to allow useful integration with the taskbars, at least in XP.

[AJH]

I have gotten used to the tabs, but what I must say I really like is the feature where you can view all pages that are open in a slideshow format. When I have 5-6 tabs created, when I click the multiple layout view (ctrl q), it is very easy to see what pages are open. Then you just click on the page that you want and it opens it right up. Has anyone else used this feature and appreciated it?