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Tabbed Browsing

One of my biggest gripes with IE 6 (may it rest in peace) was that it had no support for tabbed browsing.
Firefox, Safari, and Opera have included support for tabbed browsing for quite some time, and thankfully, the latest version of Internet Explorer now does too.

What, you may ask, is tabbed browsing? Think of it as a task bar in your web browser. It allows you to open multiple web sites in one windows, thereby keeping your valuable task bar space uncluttered. For example, let’s say that you want to open CNN.com, msnbc.com, and Google News all at the same time. In IE 6, you’d have to have three windows open, and you would have to use Alt+Tab or click on the task bar and select a window each time you wanted to navigate between them. If you wanted to have 14 web pages open, you’d have 14 windows open. That’s a lot of task bar and desktop space, not to mention a lot of memory for each copy of Internet Explorer you have open.

Now, in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE7, all you have to do is open three tabs in one window (see below for ways to do this) and open the sites you want. One window, and up to 16 tabs per window. When you want to select a tab, you just click on it underneath the address bar or use Ctrl-Tab to navigate through them. You only use memory for one instance of the web browser you have open plus a little bit extra for each tab, so there’s not nearly the same drain on system resources as there is when you have a bunch of windows open. And the REALLY nice thing about tabbed browsing is that when you minimize a window, the tabs stay in the same order that you left them in. Lots of nifty organization, very little effort.

So, how does one go about using this tabbed browsing thing? Simple.

To open a new tab in any of the big four (Firefox, IE7, Opera, Safari) that support it, select New Tab from the File menu or hit Ctrl+T (Cmd+T if you’re using a Mac).
To close a tab, select Close Tab from the File menu, hit Ctrl+W (Cmd+W on a Mac), or click the little “X” button in the tab itself.
To switch between the tabs in a given window, just click on the tab you want. You can also hit Ctrl+Tab to cycle through the tabs in a window from left to right (IE and Firefox only).
To rearrange the order of tabs in a given window, click on a tab and drag it around.

There are also a bunch of program-specific tab tricks you can use to get extra functionality out of your web browsing. You can find more information by clicking one of the links below.

Tabbed Browsing in Mozilla Firefox
Tabbed Browsing in Safari
Tabbed Browsing in Opera
Tabbed Browsing in IE7

Posted by Grant | Filed under: General — on 1/8/2007 @ 6:59 pm

Why do we get so much spam?

There was a great article in Wednesday’s New York Times about what spam is, why it’s gotten so bad, and what people are doing to combat it. The New York Times no longer requires registration to read most online content, so I highly recommend this.

Posted by Aaron | Filed under: General, Hosting, Services — on 12/8/2006 @ 10:05 am

Spam prevention tip

One of the most effective ways of limiting the spam that you get is to use a “throwaway” email address for site registrations and product sign-ups. One easy way to do this is to sign up for an account with Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail and use that account only for the above type of transaction, and then use your normal email account for business use, regular correspondence, etc.

Another option is to use a brand new service called 10 Minute Mail. You can go to the site, get an address, use it to sign up for an account, check it to get the confirmation email, and then let it expire. Not only does this give you the benefit of using a separate email account to avoid spam, it has the added convenience of no password or username to remember. Click, copy, paste, done.

Posted by Grant | Filed under: General — on 11/28/2006 @ 9:14 pm

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Tabbed Browsing

Why do we get so much spam?

Spam prevention tip