Am I the only one who's unimpressed with the tabbed browsing available in Firefox and Safari? I almost never use tabs. I'd rather have separate windows. Can someone explain to me the advantage of tabs? How have they improved your Web experience?
Well one major reasaon is speed, every time you open a new window you're opening a whole new instance of that program, therefore using more memory and slowing down your computer.. Tabs are all in one single instance of that program and so it uses less memory.. Plus they make shit far less cluttered... And middle mouse button to open a link in a new background tab is insanely convenient.. Maybe you don't so much stuff opened simultaenously, but tabs are way the hell better if you keep lots of pages open.. Just imagine having like 50 seperate windows open.
I don't know how I would browse the forums without tabs. I just middle click every thread I want to read and close them when I'm done.
OK. I wasn't aware that tabs are more efficient memory-wise. I was messing around after posting that message and I did see some benefits of using tabs, though I still like having more than one browser window open. I think it comes down to how one wants to organize their online activities. Here's how I was just utilizing tabs and separate windows. I was working on a journal entry in one window and I had Gmail open in another. For things that I needed to look up for the journal entry, I'd open a new tab in that window. That kept the two tasks separate. I don't think I ever have much reason to have more than, say, 4 separate pages open at the same time which is probably why I don't use tabs much.
You have to get used to tabs. Once you use them for a week or so, you'll never be able to live without them.
I don't suggest that anyone install ff1.5 at the present time because of the memory leakage problem. Search out and install ff1.07 instead. Even if you don't open a new window you'll see ff still running in the background after closing it. There might even be two or three instances running. Once you update your extensions in 1.5 you'll have to remove them before removing 1.5 and installing 1.07. Or you could just go into your invisible extension folder in Applications and delte everything in there. As for browsing in tabs, you can install an extension (IEView, I believe) which will imbed IE in a tab, although you'll often times get a warning / failure window. This is separate from the right-click 'open in IE' extension which starts IE externally. One of my favourite extensions is Undoclosetab which will reopen a closed tab. But you'll have to go to the previous releases section at the bottom of the page to get one that works correctly. Don't forget the 'Bookmark here' extension. Btw, don't forget to install the Cards extension for some Solitaire fun.
I used to think a lot like you when faced with using tabbed browsing. I didn't like it at first. Since then, it's grown on me (A LOT). Sometimes, I do open up two windows for two separate tasks, but it's rarely. The main reason I use tabs is because it's extremely fast. Middle click to open *or close* a tab, it's almost too efficient, and tabs open faster than Firefox anyway. Firefox is actually slower at launching than IE is.
I've only noticed firefox opening slow in windows.. In linux it's not far from instantaneous. Opening new windows is still useful sometimes, I usually do it when I've got like something entirely seperate going on and I toss it to another desktop or something.
Is there a way to prevent 1.5 from calling home? Is 1.5's autoupdate transfering data? I've never had any of the previous versions' autoupdate transfer squat... After reading the website, 1.5 sounds more like ie...wonder if they did that on purpose?
