Monday, 14th of July, 2003

One of the reasonably nice things about Internet Exploder (there have to be some, hidden away somewhere!) is that it can be embedded in other Windoze programs. If Mozilla has anything over IE (and Mozilla frankly sucks in a lot of ways too), it’s the tabbing. It’s just great to reduce the proliferation of windows when you want to browse to a whole lot of URLs at the same time, or if, say, you want to open a whole lof of subpages of a website at once (eg a whole lot of books on Amazon.com). So tabbed browsing rules.
I’ve been using NetCaptor for quite a while, and probably will continue to do so, but one nice IE add-in I discovered recently is the Google Toolbar. Nice functionality for searching the current page, and typing in search terms direct into the toolbar… In NetCaptor you can customise ways of searching different engines, so:

g searchterm

searches Google… Still, the toolbar’s nice, and in standalone IE it’s good for blocking popups, which it does in a far nicer fashion that NetCaptor or Mozilla (in both of which, if you want to briefly turn off popup blocking you have to delve into menus and submenus).
I’ve just discovered another not-so-new tabbed browser that wraps around IE, called Avant Browser. Among its attractions are its own native Google toolbar (which certainly does the things I’d want out of a Google toolbar) and much more sensible popup blocking (you can turn it off with a single click when you want to… Google’s better in that you can tell it to never block popups from certain sites.)
I’ll give it a go anyway. It’s freeware, versus NetCaptor’s trail-then-pay, which helps.

Of course, in Linux I’d probably be using Konqueror, which is introducing tabbed browsing support right now. Good on ‘em! And Mac OSX’s Safari is rather gorgeous… Ah well, *sigh*

5 Responses to “Tabbed browsing”

1. Michael Osborne says:
   July 15th, 2003 at 6:29 pm

   oh wow being pathetically un-1337 and so forth how do I get my google toolbar to stop pop-ups? Is it tricky?
   Thanks!

2. Peter says:
   July 17th, 2003 at 3:43 pm

   *hehe* Oops, well er… That would be by downloading the funky Google Toolbar 2.0 (beta) at http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php
   Don’t worry, it won’t turn your harddrive into a melted mess of long-chain polycarbons. It’ll just do cool stuff.

   Hm, shoulda mentioned the thing about the beta! Thanks Michael.

3. Aristide Aspro says:
   August 26th, 2003 at 3:48 am

   Have you tried the Opera browser?, tabs, google search (+heaps of other searches built in)

4. Andres says:
   September 6th, 2003 at 12:35 am

   You should try Mozilla Firebird (not the regular one, the Firebird version). Its great. I tossed my IE away, it’s available for many platforms and even thou im using 0.6.1 it has been so stable i am not going back to Microsoft’s browsers. When you try it, remember to download and install some extensions. I am also not happy at all with the way Microsoft treats their customers nor with their politics, so I’ve been looking for an alternative to IE for quite some time, and I just found it.

5. radagast says:
   September 11th, 2003 at 7:57 pm

   opera, opera, opera, opera, opera.

   got everything, does everything. tabs (or not if you don’t want), built-in access to all the major search engines, skins, and very friendly keyboard/mouse shortcuts to everything. they’ve got a sense of humour, and if you hang around their website they have ‘happy hours’ where you can buy it for half price!

   more stable on my PC than mozilla or IE, prettier than Konqueror, and runs on my old mac (though IE for mac does work very well).

   i haven’t tried their email client, since years ago i decided i wanted my email seperate from my web, but they seem very excited about it…

   [noone paid me to say all this]
   ansdwer