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February 09, 2006
Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout IE7: Tabbed Browsing
In IE7 Beta 2 for XP, tabbed browsing is enabled by default. To open a new blank tab, click the New Tab button (a stub of a tab to the right of the tab bar) or press Ctrl+T. To close a tab, click the red X on the active tab. That's a big improvement over the out-of-the-box behaviour of Firefox, which requires one or more extensions to properly tame the tabbed interface. You can save a group of tabs to your Favourites list under a single folder (so that you can open the group with a single click), and can designate multiple tabs as a home page group.
The trouble with tabbed browsing, of course, is trying to find a particular page. After you've opened eight or ten pages, the text on the tab is reduced to a cryptic and not-so-helpful couple of characters. The solution? Click the Quick Tabs icon to the left of the first open tab to display a thumbnail view of all open pages. The visual cues are usually enough to help you find the right page; if not, a text label above each thumbnail helps identify the page. An X in the top right corner of each mini-page lets you close unwanted pages without having to leave the thumbnail view. You'll find a few rough edges when you look closely at the tabbed browsing feature. Clicking a link from Microsoft Outlook, for instance, always opens a new browser window rather than opening a new tab. You can't rearrange the order of open tabs. And when you've filled all available space on the tab bar — the exact number depends on your screen resolution — some tabs disappear from the display, with no way to scroll to the missing pages. The only way to access pages that have scrolled off the tab bar is to use the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut, Quick Tabs view, or the drop-down list of open pages.
IE7 includes other features stolen, er, borrowed from other browsers, including an integrated search box that supports the OpenSearch standard and a one-stop option to clear personal information (cached pages, cookies, saved passwords, and so on). But the biggest innovation in the new IE interface is what you don't see. By hiding the classic menus and shrinking toolbars to a bare minimum, IE7 leaves more room for the browser window itself than any of its competitors, including older versions of Internet Explorer. Most important functions are available from the standard toolbar, which includes a pair of efficient drop-down menus. (Miss those old-school menus? You can make them reappear temporarily by tapping the Alt key, or bring them back for good by adjusting an option on the Tools menu.) The most welcome feature of all — at least in terms of getting rid of an everyday annoyance — might be the subtle improvements in the Print menu. When you print a page in IE7, the width automatically scales to fit the paper. No more printouts with the right margin cut off. |
