The tabs omission is gonna cost MS dearly, you'll see.
That's the (a?) trouble with MS: Short attention span.
Team A susses out some angles, makes design decisions that neatly
side-step a bunch of problems. Said problems never arise. Team B
comes along and throws out the decisions team A brought to the party
and gee whiz who'd have thought it, runs into what team A avoided.
So it is with MDI. MDI (Multiple Document Interface) was one of the
good ideas Win3.yuk made standard (some DOS apps were already doing
this). Then IE did the five-dozen-heap-bleeding-separate-windows
thing, complete with scrollbars on the Taskbar.
Then they broke MS Office around Office 2000 to fit with this
benighted IE design. So great, now I have to guess which of a dozen
Excel instances is the one with the sheet I want to switch to. YUKK!!
XP brings some sense to the madness by grouping instances of the same
app, and that helps particularly when you can see what apps they are
in the Taskbar group's pop-up.
But Netscape 7.x (and presumably the open-source foundation apps it's
drawn from, such as Mozilla if not FireFox) give you the best of both
worlds - you can kick open a new window *or* a new tab. So; have
three open Windows with different Google searches in each, and kick
open each search's links as tabs in the same window.
This is a sensible way to work.
Thanks for the FireFox version heads-up, and links to that and new
Mozilla. I haven't looked in that direction since Netscape 7.02, and
will now be doing so. As it is, my standard practice is IE 6 SP1,
Netscape 7.02 and the pre-AOL Netscape 4.8 (which I run with
Java/JavaScript suppressed as a safer tyre-kicker).
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