Tag Archives: Internet

Internet – Tabbed Browsing

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At last nights BPCA meeting, I was showing some of the different sites that I frequent. One of the members asked what the tabs were for. I was using Firefox at the time.

The question prompted me to give a short version of the reasons I prefer to using a browser with tabbing capabilities. As it turns out, a good number in attendance use Internet Explorer exclusively for their web browsing, which does not currently have tabbing capabilities. I have not checked things out for myself, but I have read that there are plug-ins available to enable tabbed browsing in IE and that the new IE 7 will have it.

Years back I experimented with the Opera browser, which I believe was the first to offer tabbed browsing, and liked the idea, so when Firefox came along I switched to it and have been using it for quite a while now.

Now to my reasons for preferring a tab capable browser.

I can have a large number of sites open all at the same time, and be able to keep track of where they are very easily. By contrast, without tabbed browsing all these sites would be open in different windows, making it very hard to separate them from other open programs.

When I am using a search engine, regardless of which one, I can open links to the results in separate tabs, which load in the background, letting me keep looking at the results for more pertinent information.

I do a lot of research with my browser and keeping sites open in separate tabs enables me to quickly retrieve information, without the necessity of continually using the back or forward buttons or the history to keep going back and forth between sites.

It is very easy to move from tab to tab, or even rearrange the order of the tabs, once you get used to it.

There are probably a lot more reasons users like tabs for browsing, those listed above are just my main reasons. If you have any thoughts regarding tab use or even just have a different reason for using them than what I have listed, please let me know.

Try tabbed browsing. If you do not like it, you can always go back to the non tabbed browsing that works for you.

Internet – Selecting Text For Copying

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Have you ever had the problem of using the mouse to highlight text on a site and getting portions of other text you did not want? This is usually because the site is using tables or columns you can not see to display its content.

Instead of using the mouse to drag across the text to be selected, position the cursor at the beginning of the first word, hold down the Shift key and position the cursor at the end of the last word. All the text between these positions will now be selected and can then be copied and pasted wherever it is you want to place the text, without any of the items you do not want.

I know this is really a basic thing but, I see a lot of my co-workers having trouble selecting only the text they intend.

By the way, the same technique works in most instances of Windows selection, providing more control over selection.