The Dangers of Tabbed Browsing
One of the things I don't like about IE is that it's the only browser that doesn't do tabbed browsing. I quite like tabs as they help keep my desktop tidy. The only problem I have with them, and browsing in general, is that it lets me make stupid mistakes. You can easily spend an hour writing in a text field and accidentally close the browser, losing all your work, without warning. We could stop this in IE if all pages used a combination of this and this, but that's not really practical. It's down to us as users to be more diligent.
The problem gets worse with tabbed browsing. I've lost count of the number of times I've spent an age writing something in one tab, opened another page in another tab, closed the browser (thinking I was only closing this one page) and lost all my work. It looks like I'm not the only one as a new feature in the latest Firefox 0.9 release introduces a prompt that warns you when you close a browser window with more than one tab.
I've been using the updated Firefox since its release last week and already it's saved me huge amounts of time. Brilliant. If you haven't already, get it now!
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That's happened to me a couple time, and it is annoying.
Another thing I don't like: if you load one webpage with a form in it, and then quickly open a new tab and start typing a URL, you can suddenly lose focus as a text field on the hidden tab grabs focus.
For example, I often open a Hotmail tab and then open another tab for CNN while the Hotmail tab is loading. But the Username field on the Hotmail tab grabs focus when that page is finished loading! You'll type, but seemingly nothing will be happening.
Check these firefox extensions (i've been using them from v0.8): tabwarning - {Link} (essentially the same as the one you write about), undoclosetab - {Link} and sessionsaver - {Link}
They're great.
P.S. God, how much I hate IE... and i still need to develop apps for this fat pig of a browser.
On my way to get Firefox 0.9 ... Almost 1.0 then ...
Another great feature is the ability to load new links in the background, so you can open many Tabs while staying on the same page, (Great with Google search)
Allen, the next version will probably be 0.10 ;)
Nah, it is actually going to be 1.0 (ETA July according to the mozilla site)
Jake,
Netcaptor ({Link} is a shell browser for IE, it supports tabbed browsing...
Everyone rages on about Firefox, which is great, but I've not found it any faster yet. I tend to only need to look at one site at a time, and one of the major sites I look at screws up in the damn thing.
I still await to see the genius :)
One day, you never know.
Is Opera still being used?
Ian,
faster than what? Mozilla? Opera? IE? Faster doing what? Looking at a single page? It all depends.
From my experience, the UI is now at least as fast to handle as in IE, where the Mozilla application suite still lacks behind a little. It's not really anoying on a 2 GHz+ PC (even less with Windows XP's bells and whistles all turned on, which slows down everything else), but it's still noteable. Rendering of complex web sites is also extremely quick and it's at least more eye-friendly. When loading and reloading pages in IE, there is a lot more flickering. I still like the Moz application suite for a couple of reasons, but still Firefox 0.9 was the first Phoenix-Browser that made it as my default browser, at home and at work.
btw: Mozilla 1.6 already featured the "closing multipel tabs" warning.
My 15-year old son accidentally stumbled on the following neat little trick in FF:
After (accidentally or not) closing a tab, just press CTRL-Shift-T to get it right back! Sweet!