Keeping Tabs on Firefox

Tabbed browsing is a great way to maximize screen real estate while keeping your browsing organized. Along with the "Open link in new tab" command, found by Ctrl-clicking (or right-clicking if using a multi-button mouse). This will open up a new toolbar underneath the address bar, called the tab bar, appropriately enough. This is where you can essentially store links that you'd like to follow up later. Today's web pages are so rich with links that there are invariably more places to go then memory available to remember them (and I mean the gray cells). But, you counter, can't I just click the back button when I'm done following a link? Yes, but going back through the maze of links is time-consuming, click-intensive and frequently annoying, especially if some of the sites have popups, spyware or worse.

Tabbed browsing allows those fragments of thought processes to occupy a concrete (well, as permanent as anything on the web) spot, awaiting only your attention to return and give those frozen moments life, like ephemeral bookmarks. It has the added advantage of loading pages in the background, so that when you are ready to return, they are fully loaded and ready to peruse (unless you're on dial-up, in which case the limited bandwidth would be better spent loading the current page). For those with a memory like a Swiss... umm... a thing with holes in it, tabbed browsing allows us the luxury of putting links on a back burner for later retrieval. Open up the tabbed browsing and give it a try--after a little while you'll wonder what the back button is for.