Tabbed browsing with IE7 and a little trick to switch between tabs

Last week, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my browser to Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s latest version. Despite Microsoft moving a lot of buttons around on me I do like the new interface. The most noticeable difference by far is the introduction of tabbed browsing.

For those of you not familiar with tabbed browsing, it basically allows you to open a second or third (or more) web page without losing the first. Each web page gets its own “tab” near the top of the Internet Explorer window and you can switch between them by simply clicking the tab of the web page you wish to go to. Sure you could do this with past versions of Internet Explorer as well but you had to open up a separate copy of Internet Explorer every time you wanted to open a new web page without losing the one you were on.

If all of that sounds confusing, just think of a program like Microsoft Word. Once you open Microsoft Word you can open three or four documents without having to launch another copy of Microsoft Word for each document.

From a noobie standpoint, what practical applications does the new tabbed browsing have? Well… here’s one that’s just in time for the holiday season. Say I am at amazon.com and I am looking at a new inkjet printer but I’m wondering if bestbuy.com or circuitcity.com may have it cheaper. Without tabbed browsing I have to either open up another couple of instances of Internet Explorer (a big memory hog) or I need to go to the other web sites in my existing browser, check out the price and then somehow remember how to get back to where I was at amazon.com.

Now, let’s approach the same task with tabbed browsing. While I am on amazon.com I just click on a blank tab and go to bestbuy.com. Then I click on another blank tab and go to circuitcity.com. Now I have amazon.com, bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com all open in the same copy of Internet Explorer. Once I find the same product at each site I can just click the tab for each site to quickly compare prices to see where I want to purchase my new printer.

One last thing. If you don’t like using the mouse to click the tabs to switch between tabbed web pages, just use the Ctrl-Tab combination on your keyboard. Each type you press Ctrl-Tab it will cycle through the open tabs in your browser.