Internet Explorer 8: A Hands-on View - Fun With Tabs
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You're probably expecting me to talk about the colored tabs in IE 8 that let you keep track of related groups of pages. I'll get to that, but first, I want to mention something cool that carried over from IE 7. If you didn't know about it before, some of you will find it to be a real time saver. I'm going to stay on the right of the browser and go down to show you this item, which warranted a little research on my part. Here's the screen shot for your reference:
Take a look at the home icon on the left. It has an arrow next to it. What can you do with it?
Do you see the options for “Add or Change Home Page” and “Remove All...”? Thanks to tabs, you can have more than one page as your home page – in fact, you can set up IE 8 to automatically open up to eight tabs at once when it starts, with a different page in each one. Microsoft provides a detailed description to help you set this up. As I said before, this was available in IE 7, but somehow it looks more obvious now; IE 8 seems to have a brighter color scheme than IE 7 in Vista, which makes icons stand out better.
Yes, as you've probably heard, colored tabs can help you group pages. If you've opened a link in a new tab, for example, all of the tabs turn the same color. If you're on page A and you open a link to page B in a new tab, they'll be the same color; a link from page B opened in a new tab (to page C) will also be the same color. If you then close all but one page and start opening links in new tabs again, you'll get a different color.
What I haven't seen anyone mention, other than Microsoft, is that if you right-click on a tab that is part of a group, you suddenly get a whole bunch of options. Let me show you:
I'll let Microsoft explain it: “By right-clicking on any tab, you can close the tab, close the tab group, or remove the tab from a group. From the same menu, you can refresh one or all tabs, open a new tab, reopen the last tab closed, or see a list of all recently closed tabs and reopen any or all of them.”
Internet Explorer 8 groups related tabs together. If you close one tab in a group, the next tab that is part of the same group pops up, so that you're not presented with a page that is not related to your current task. It's a nice example of developers adapting a tool to the way it's actually used, and to how its users think. It reminds me of Microsoft making its operating system more adaptable by putting icons for the most-used programs in the start menu. The programs that went there would be different for every user. Some users didn't like it at the time, but it became indispensable.
As you've probably guessed, I'm not done by a long shot, but I'm out of space. There will be more in the next part, when I hope to get to Microsoft's biggest innovations: accelerators and web slices. See you then!
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