Okay, I mentioned earlier that when it comes to my internet browser, I'm a Firefox fan. You can get it here (it's open-source and free).
There's a lot to like about it, but one of my favorite features (now emulated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer) is the tabs feature.
Let's say you're at one of my favorite websites, Arts & Letters Daily. You see three articles that interest you. Rather than clicking on each one, reading it, and then hitting the Back button, you can use tabs.
Here's how. You know that scroll wheel on your mouse? Well, it's also a button (we'll refer to it as the "middle-click"). Hover your mouse pointer over a link you're interested in. Now click the scroll wheel (middle click). Did you see a new tab open up at the top of your screen? Good. Now, do the same thing with a few more links. Now you have a couple tabs open and each tab is one of those articles you want to read.
Just click on the tab to read the article you want. You can close it when you're done reading by clicking on the red "x" button on each tab.
Why is this handy? First, it makes it harder for you to lose your place when you aren't constantly hitting the Back button. And second, you can bookmark a group of tabs to look at later.
Suppose you're planning to buy a new TV. You can have a group of tabs -- maybe two tabs are reviews of the TV, maybe a couple of tabs are product pages on Best Buy's or Circuit City's website. Well, now you can go to Menu --> Bookmarks --> Bookmark All Tabs and type in a folder name (for example, "New TV research").
Now, let's say you come back to your computer tomorrow and you want to start your research again. Go to your bookmarks sidebar (the hotkey for it is "CTRL-B") and look for the folder you saved the tabs under (we named it "New TV research" in our example). You can click it open and click on any item to open it. We're impatient, though, so we aren't going to do that.
Just hover your mouse pointer over the folder ("New TV research") in your sidebar and click the scroll wheel (middle-click). It will now open every item in the folder as its own tab.
Neat, eh?
Link to Firefox
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Tuesday's Tech Tip: Firefox and tabs
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6 comments:
Thanks for doing this Jay! It's great to use this as a tool to educate people, too. I would offer that you can also open a new tab by right-clicking and choosing "open in new tab".
That's a good point for people with older mice (mouses?) -- you can always right-click and select open new tab.
What does everyone else think about a weekly tech tip? Do you like the idea of it? And if you do, what sorts of things would you like to see covered?
I'd kind of like to hit the basics -- how to personalize a Google start page, how to use scan for spyware, how to personalize Firefox, that sort of thing.
We can always move on to intermediate and advance tips later if it helps.
What do you all think?
Firefox is where it's at. Good advice.
I just downloaded Firefox and I love it. In case people don't know this, it is compatible with Mac. I love the tabs feature! It's a real time saver.
Runner's Anonymous, how do you like Firefox compared to Safari? I'm pretty sure Safari has tab support.
Oh, and, keep an eye out for the final version of Firefox 3.0 -- there will be a version specific to OSX that will retain the OSX look and feel.
Nice blog, BTW.
Safari has tabs?! Well bless my soul, so it does! As you can tell I'm not much of a techie. I switched to Mac two years ago because I was tired of The Blue Screen Of Death that always seemed to find it's way to my PC.
I like the idea of a weekly tech tip. For my part you could cover anything....I didn't even know my computer had tabs!
Thanks for the comment about my blog!
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