WIT 2003

Tabbed Browsing

(This page written by Ben Buckley, WIT systems assistant)

Until recently, to look at more than one Webpage at a time, you had to open your browser multiple times. This is a less than ideal setup, since you have to minimize one browser window and bring up the next to switch between pages. Furthermore, the more browser windows you have open, the slower your computer goes. Some of the newest browsers, like Netscape 7.x and and Internet Explorer 6.x take up a lot of a computer's resources, so viewing more than one page a time can very quickly slow your computer to a crawl.

Luckily, the newest versions of Netscape (and Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird, which are all based on the same program) has a feature called "tabbed browsing". "Tabs" are multiple pages inside your browser window, each one displaying its own page (fig. 1). This feature lets you have more than one page open at time without opening your browser more than once. Using tabs, you get to have multiple web pages all in quick reach with a much smaller drain on your system's resources.

In the picture above, you can see the tabs, which look like the tabs on file folders in a filing cabinet. Each tab shows the name of the webpage it is displaying. By clicking on a tab, you switch to that webpage. There are two ways to use tabs:

• To follow a link without leaving the original page or opening a new browser window, right click on the link and select Open Link in New Tab (fig. 2).

  

• To open an address you already know or to do a search without opening a new browser window, go to the menus at the top and select File --> New --> Navigator Tab (fig. 3).

  

There are a couple other tricks that make tabbed browsing even more useful:

• To instantly access a whole set of pages that go together the next time you open Netscape, go to the menus and select Bookmarks --> Bookmark This Group of Tabs (fig. 4).

  

• You can set up your mouse in Netscape to automatically open a link in a new tab (and other options for using tabs) by going to Edit --> Preferences and, under Category, selecting Navigator --> Tabbed Browsing (fig. 5).

  

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