Maria’s Guides

A Firefox (and perhaps other tabbed browser?) quick tip.

I’m pretty sold on Firefox and absolutely dependent on its tabbed browsing feature. For those of you who don’t know what tabbed browsing is, it’s a feature that enables you to open multiple Web pages in the same Web browser window. Each window is opened in its own “tab” which is accessible with a simple click.

Firefox has supported tabbed browsing for some time now. Safari on the Mac does, too. And Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows has finally caught up, adding this feature in version 7.

Today, while trying desperately to catch up with the few RSS feeds that I follow, I ran across an article on LifeHacker by Adam Pash titled “Firefox Quick Tip: Drag and Drop URL Text.” In it Adam explains how to open a URL displayed on a Web page by dragging it to the address bar. Pretty simple stuff, but probably a revelation for someone who didn’t know they could do this.

With tabbed browsing, you can do something similar — but better. Say you’re reading a blog article that includes a lot of links. You want to follow the links, but you want to finish reading the article first. If you’re like me, you know you’ll forget to go back and click the links.

If you already know this trick, you’re probably saying, “Pretty simple stuff.” If so, stop reading and get on with your life. But if this is all new to you, read on.

Here’s what you do: drag the link you want to read to a blank part of the tab bar (the close button at the end of the tab bar works, too) — or to a tab you don’t mind overwriting with other content. Firefox will load that page in the background while you continue to read the page that link was on.

Another way to do this is to Control-click (Mac OS) or right-click on a link and choose the Open Link in New Tab command on the contextual menu that appears.

This is especially useful if you have a really slow Internet connection (like I do at home) and don’t like to wait for pages to load. It enables you to keep busy doing something else while your computer gets the page you want to see. Then, when you’re ready to read the page, it’s ready and waiting for you.

Of course, to take advantage of tabbed browsing, it must be enabled and the tab bar must be displayed. In Mac OS, choose Firefox > Preferences, click the Tabs button, and turn off the option labeled “Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open.” Click the close button to close the preferences window and save your settings.