Now I will proceed to preach to the choir, but perhaps there remain a few unsaved readers who don't yet know that there is a better way to browse than the ones offered by Netscape and Microsoft. Tabs may be old hat to those whose browsers support them, but If you're stuck using IE or any Netscape product other than Mozilla, this will quickly ruin you for browsers still stuck popping up new windows (yuck!) every time you want to view a new site or page or larger image ...
(Actually, all of you in the choir can quietly go now. The unconverted should stay around for a minute.)
OK, tab virgins: you have nothing to lose but your thumb-twiddles! Think for a second about the way your browser handles your clicks. When you click on a hyperlink from yahoo.com to a news story on nut-prices.com to read about an increase in the price of beetlenuts, your browser probably blanks out for a second, then slowly (or quickly, bandwidth and network conditions depending) opens the page you requested.
That's fine, and it's the way browsers have worked since the Web began. If you wanted to keep the Yahoo! page up in case beetlenut futures didn't work out, you may have discovered what most Web browsers probably never discover, that you can open new sites in new windows. (If you think most browser users know this, you probably also think most people read their car manuals.) A new window is groovy with one or two or three sites at a time, but a bit of a pain as the windows pile up.
Tabs ignore that one-link-one-browser-window mentality, and instead do things better and smarter. The basic idea of tabs is this: when you click on a link (it may take an optional nudge, like an option key or a drop-down menu), you don't go straight to the new site: instead, your browser spawns a new tab, a button arranged next to other tabs like the tabbed edges of file folders. Hence the name, of course. Each tab is a sort of hyperlink, not to web sites per se, but to views of the web sites you've opened, available one at a time, depending on which page's tab is active.
Tabs by default tend to live toward the top of your browser window, below navigation icons and textbars, just above the web page you're viewing. I like them there, but it's also possible to set your preferences so tabs appear on the bottom or side instead. I set my default tab-behavior in Opera, Galeon and Mozilla to "open in background," and ask my browser to open things like uninvited windows spawned by Javascript in separate background tabs, for reasons I'll get into in a second. That means that besides the sudden appearance of a new tab up by the toolbar, clicking on a link (with nudge) suddenly does something you would not have wanted or expected in old-style browser to your current page: nothing.
Even though it leaves your current page politely alone, your click has done something -- it's requested, and hopefully is rendering, your page for you. When it's loaded (the loading arrow stops in Mozilla; the tab turns blue in Galeon), you can click on over and view the loaded page. You may wonder: if I want to open a link referred in a new story or whatever my favorite portal happens to be, Why do this in the background, rather than let the *old* page remain a tab while the new one pops up directly? The reason (besides simple subjective preference) is that even the best-designed websites with the most interesting and relevant links derail one of the most precious things you possess while using the web, whether for work or fun: your train of thought. It's too easy (at least for me) to follow links hither and yon and actually forget what I was looking for in the first place. Trying to backtrack through a few layers of followed links is too common a disease. The blanking-out effect of conventional browsing is a contributory factor here. As an experiment, start reading the front page of any newspaper, and light some magnesium flares at intervals of about 30 seconds. Each time you light a flare, slap yourself on the face and turn to a random section of the paper. Now -- what were you reading? And frankly, watching pages load is usually interesting only if the page breaks itself oddly, like progressinve JPEGs that decide to hell with progressing. I'd rather keep reading my initial page while the new one loads, unless it's such a stinker I've gone straight to the URL bar anyhow.
Besides benefiting easily distracted people, tabbed browsing helps out entire sites, especially those loaded with frames. Ever tried to navigate back and forward in a frame-heavy website to find that your opinion of where "back" should lead differs from that of the server dishing out the pages? Especially annoying when that means resetting a shopping cart you've carefully assembled movie and book orders into -- not that this has ever happened to me.
Though this isn't exactly the end of the list, I'll settle for one more non-trivial advantage of tabs, which is that tabs-in-background browsing moves the task of checking a series of links slightly to the right on the chore <--> joy continuum. Photo galleries, links of references, and other sidebar information can be ordered up rapid-fire, then read one tab at a time, at your leisure. If the resulting page is missing, but from a site with sane error reporting, you won't even have to open the tab, you will notice 403, 404 or other errors in the label of each tab.
Opera (the browser) was first with tabs, and has had them since its introduction as payware, and among open-source browsers, Galeon and Opera should soon be joined on the Linux desktop by a resurgent Konqueror. If Opera (the company) wants to hook more buyers for its no-ads version, I bet switching off tabs in the giveaway would do the trick. I also suspect that new versions of IE and Netscape will finally adopt tabs, which will be to their credit. Slicing browser attention is something that it has taken smart programmers to figure out, and I'll gladly give up pre-sliced bread in exchange.
Viva la tabs!
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