Internet Explorer 8 Quick Tour (part 2) - Browsing in Tabbed Pages

Browsing in Tabbed Pages

If you open several different pages at once and you don’t want multiple Internet Explorer buttons to clog your taskbar, you can view multiple pages from within the IE8 window by creating new tabbed pages and then opening a new website in each page. Tabbed pages have been around for a long time in other web browsers such as Firefox and add-ons to IE such as Avant Browser, but now Microsoft has finally caught up with the times in IE7, thank goodness.

IE8 introduces the concept of color-coded Tab Groups for at-a-glance visualization of related browser tabs. Though subtle, this improvement can significantly impact your productivity levels by logically grouping related tabs. For example, in IE7 if you write a blog or update page content and preview changes before posting to the Web, the content often appears in a new tab to the far right—far removed from the current working tab. You could easily get confused with multiple open tabs with no visual indication as to how those tabs relate to each other—there was simply no at-a-glance contextual information to distinguish between tabs.

New to IE8, however, are color-coding and grouping options, which eliminate all that guesswork. You can even move tabs between groups by simply dragging the desired tab into a designated group, at which point it assumes the appropriate color coding. Right-click any tab to control the entire group, including closing the group, closing all tabs except those in a given group, and ungrouping select tabs from a chosen group. You can also perform actions to individual tabs. And if you accidentally close the wrong tab or tabs, you can recover by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T. You can also right-click any tab and select Recently Closed Tabs to pick from a list of associated tabs. IE8 has adopted and embraced all the features of competing browsers to ensure it maintains all the best-of-breed options right at home.

New tabs open to present multiple links that allow you to open recently closed tabs, an InPrivate browsing session, and the Accelerator that makes selection-specific searches and page content grabbing easier. Each tab is perfectly isolated to prevent browser crashes when a single page blows up—a previous sore spot for IE browsing. Now you can restore the crashed tab and reload exactly the information when it crashed, including unfinished blog entries, interrupted email correspondence, or interrupted streaming video.

When you open IE8, your home page appears in the default tab. As mentioned earlier, the default home page is MSN, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Internet Explorer displays Microsoft’s Bing search engine in the Search tab.

The name of the page appears in the tab. Next to the tab is a second, smaller tab. When you click this tab, a new tabbed page appears to the right of the first tab and displays the New Tab page, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The New Tab page provides convenient links to get you going.

The New Tab page provides information about how to get started with tabbed browsing and to learn more about tabs. The tab at the top of the window (with the title “New Tab – Windows Internet Explorer”) is raised and appears in a different color, to let you know that the tabbed page is the one you’re viewing. Now that the new tabbed page is open, you can open a website in the page by typing the URL in the Address box.

You can create a new tab by clicking the small tab to the right of the new tab you just created. If you want to close your current tab, click the X to the right of the tab title.

Each tab has a set width, and all the tabs must fit between the Add Favorites button and the buttons on the right side of the toolbar. If the page title in the tab is too long to fit in the width of the tab, the title is truncated with ellipses at the right side of the title. You can view the entire name by moving the mouse pointer over the tab; about a half-second later, a pop-up menu appears that displays the full name of the tab. Unless the name of the page is extremely long, the full name appears in the Internet Explorer title bar as well.

When you create more than one tab, two small buttons appear to the left of the first tab. When you click the Quick Tabs button, a list of all your open web pages in tabs appears in the Quick Tabs page, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. The Quick Tabs page is a great jump-off point for your most frequented sites.

The Quick Tabs page shows thumbnails of all the web pages in all the tabs. The page titles and the Close (X) button appear above the thumbnails. Click a thumbnail to open the tab, or click the Close (X) button to close the tab.

You can also view a list of all the tabs in list form by clicking the Tab List button. A list of open tabs appears underneath the button. Open a tab by clicking the tab name in the list; the currently open tab has a check mark to the left of the tab title.

If you close Internet Explorer while you have more than one tab open, a dialog box appears and asks if you want to close all tabs. When you click the Close Tabs button, IE8 closes and only one tab appears the next time you open IE8. You can click the Show Options button to tell IE8 to reopen all the currently open tabs the next time you open Internet Explorer, and then click the Close Tabs button to close IE8.