Thoughts on Tabs and Windows

If you had asked me, before Firefox came along, if tabs were a good idea for a web-browser, I would have said no, absolutely not. The old Mozilla Browser had them, and Opera had them. Both were clunky and intrusive.

The real reason I would have thought it was a bad idea, though, is that tabs introduce a whole new metaphor to desktop document management. We already have windows - adding tabs inside windows just messes everything up. You can’t use existing operating system window management techniques to switch between tabs, such as Alt+Tab or the window-list taskbar. Why should some documents be in tabs and in a window, while others are each in their own window. It would be anarchy!

Yes, all of the above criticisms of tabs are true, but it doesn’t matter. Regardless of broken and mixed metaphors, after about two years of using Firefox (and the betas that led up to it), I use tabbed-browsing extensively. (Via Acts of Volition)