Browsers are the most important applications in the modern world. Many people spend lots of time surfing the internet, so choosing the right browser should be a priority. I have been trying out Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Opera to find out the right one for me. There are many things people want in a browser and they advocate browsers based on that. Standard compliance and security may be features many would be looking forward to. For me, it is ease of use. The functions I need freuquently should be the ones that are easiest to do.
Most modern day browsers support tabbed browsing. Managing tabs can be a very tedious and irritating task. Especially when we have more than 10 tabs open, finding the right one can be very difficult. Recently, while playing around with Opera, I found out a new way of using tabs. Look at the screenshot (click to enlarge).
There are many advantages of using this scheme:
- More tabs can be accomodated easily. In my 1280 x 800 monitor, 26 tabs can be shown at the same time. In the usual way of using the tabs, only 5-6 tabs can be accomodated.
- For your widescreen monitors, this way of organising tabs can be very advantageous since the extra width can be used effectively. As you can see in the screenshot, it does not take up any space from the website.
- Closing tabs by mistake can be avoided easily since we can easily avoid moving the mouse over the close button.
- Navigating between tabs can be accomplished easily with very little mouse movement.
- Length of tabs do not change with number of tabs. In the usual way, the length of the tabs decreases and it becomes very difficult to manage the tabs.
To try it out:
- Select View >> Toolbars >> Customize. A dialog box will come up
- Click on the tab bar in Opera. (It will get highlighted)
- Then in the dialog box change Placement to Left and click OK.
- Done !!!
After trying this method for some time now, I fell love with it and I don’t want to switch back to the old way. This is awesome way to save time and avoid frustration. Only Opera seems to support this scheme however.
PS: Opera is a very good browser too. It is secure, completely standard compliant and there are some cool feartures like recovering accidentaly closed tabs, selectively disabling images or ads from websites, in-built mail client etc. Read more at the Opera website.
Well, using firefox with addons like tab-mix plus, you can accomodate far more no. of tabs in a much smpler way. Rather you can acoomodate them the way you want, be it horizontally or vertcally.
This is a great way to manage your tabs, but in my experience this method is not working properly on all skins. Most of them handle it well though, and it’s been a while since I last tested it (Opera 7 og 8 I think). And as you mentioned in the post; it is not becoming great before you have a widescreen monitor. On my twelwe inch PowerBook it is quite useless.
Well that’s just because Macs suck, you know. On my Dell i9400 with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, this works like a charm. Only drawback is that I have to put the Panels at the right edge of the screen.
I too use opera for my daily browsing. I like firefox, but I always have atleast 10 tabs open, and firefox takes too much resources with that many tabs open. And when there are too many tabs open (>20), there is a very high chance of accidently closing a tab, while trying to activate it. At such instances pressing CTRL+SHIFT+T will reopen the tab. The shortcut works in both Opera and Firefox. It really is a very handy shortcut.
Joyce,
Good to see you back after the long gap (I guess 15 days is a long gap in the internet).
By the way, I actually started using Opera after reading your blog and learned about your plugin for Opera – “Torplus”
I haven’t tried it yet, but will. soon.
[...] works very fast. If you want to work online for a long time, Opera is the best choice, especially if you want to open a lot of tabs. Opera has many great features that will enhance your surfing experience, but the Opera team should [...]
Folks,
I am used to hide the close button in my tabs. I prefer to close them by middle-clicking on them (or via CTL-W). Should I mistakenly close a tab, I can easily reopen it via CTL-Z, ala “W*ndows Undo”. If I want to reopen a particular tab, I just select it from the tab trashcan.
As for arranging tabs titles on my 17” monitor, I let them wrap to multiple lines. As I write, this, I have 11 open tabs whose titles are distributed across two lines. No clutter whatsoever, full tab titles so I don’t have to memorize their order.
Since I discovered Opera, some 5 years ago, I left IE just for work-related stuff. I tried Firefox, but it is so empty at the beginning, it’s depressing. And i’ts a pain in the neck to look for (and pick) the right add-ons to get what Opera gives out of the box.
But hey, guys, it’s just me. YMMV.
el mismo,
Thanks for sharing your comments. The shortcuts are very useful too.
There are many people who like Opera than IE or FF.
I was never a fan of Firefox.
FF is boring – Nothing new.
What are the steps to trying out the tiled vertical tabs in Opera?
samaraimike,
I have updated the post.
Cool
well i gotta tell you, ive used the taskbar like that for the longest.
I actually started doing that from linux, i dont remember witch wm it was from, but i am guessing its been around for a while now. One solution could be to put your taskbar like that, and not use any tabs within the browser. I have been using opera for a long time, and it is a very fast browser. As long as you dont have that many tabs open, or the site youre in doesn’t have to load from images from lot of domains. You can fine tune opera, but firefox is much more rich in addons. I recomend Opera on any mobile or low power operating system, its just an amazing browser. But if you have to fine tune it, its not my pick for the browser of the day.
missingxtension,
Thanks for the advice!!!
I keep trying Opera. And after a time, just can’t take it anymore. Where have all the good designers gone?
The only thing Opera has (in aggregate) over FF or others is it is very stable – still not perfectly stable. FF crashes all the time, probably because it is so feature rich and the massive development is not well controlled (well?)
A small view of my issues with Opera:
1. Miminal help on the Web. People who use Opera seem not to be detail oriented. sorry.
2. I can’t drag & drop urls to the desktop or to anywhere in XP.
3. Tabs are unusable. Can’t control them. I click and nothing happens. Then Oooops! it works! I open in a new tab, the page loads but there is no tab. Can’t close the window, can’t figure out where the tab is. click click click on tabs and nothing. Many times only the first few tabs show but the blank area to the right can be clicked and you can get the differnt pages. Should have learned the violin! (no frets, no seeing) – I could go on, but the tabs are pretty unusable. Why? No idea. I have Opera 9.64, XP sp3, 4gig ram, 3.5mhz processor – dual 24″ Dell flat panels. Incredible dual HDMI head GForce graphics card.
I used FF for many years. If it had the stability of Opera I’d be a happy camper. FF is so feature rich -a great add-in community. It could use some nice features that are in Opera but visa versa too. a wash. (awash?)
I often have 15 tabs open in each of 6 or so windows. Of course each browser has great features and missing other essential features. It would be nice if they looked at the other browsers and took notes.
IE, as anything from MS, is only as good as competition forces it to be. & once it has enough dominant market share, they no longer care about what they offer. Only for cultists.