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even Internet Explorer 8 contains its own version of this very useful idea. The difference is that IE8 does it for all the tabs currently open and Opera works with favorites.

When it comes to tabs and new ways of doing things, Firefox is not only cannibalizing the rest of the browser world, its open source development base provides for a vast assortment of new ideas as well. An add-on called Tab Mix Plus provides so many different options for how a tab works that you almost need to go Amazon.com to find a manual. There are add-ons that will change colors to show the age of a tab, add-ons that try to keep tabs grouped together based on site URLs, and add-ons that will put your tabs in a side bar, making it easier to find a particular page later on. One of the coolest add-ons, visual speaking is Fox Tabs. Fox Tab can be set up in several different layouts and cycled through with ctr-tab much the same way alt-tab cycles through open applications in Windows. Talk about feeling a sense of power, wow!

Tabs are all about user functionality. While most of what has developed with tabs in recent history is not too much different than the original idea, it is obvious that tabs are providing avenues for new ways of interacting with the content a user wants to explore. Even the graphically radical Fox Tabs is just a way to switch between tabs, but it does give a hint of how important tabs really are and how they will be part of the interactive future we call the web.

Learn more about this author, Zakary Venturo.
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