Hideki A. Ikeda (HidekiAI) [池田英紀] ["Tony" Ikeda] – BLog

A while back, Microsoft had introduced tabs to compete with Firefox.  Once you get hooked on this tab mechanism, you couldn’t live without it.  My wife for one, is a big fan of Firefox and I’m pretty sure she cannot live without the tabs.  So I installed the update on IE to see what this tab is all about.  I’m a big fan of OpenSource (as I praise a lot about it in my BLogs) but because I tend to develop the most (professionally) on Microsoft environment, I stick with what Microsoft provides if in the realm associated to developments.  Remember the days when you thought Borland’s Turbo Assembler and Turbo C was the IDE to use because the debugger kicked ass?  Oh I loved Brief editor and other text editors too…  Or when you had the choice of 3Dfx, OpenGL and DirectX?  When it all came down to it, in the end, I had to retrain myself towards Microsoft.  Although I use Eclipse often for editing PHP source codes, I still rank Microsoft Visual Studio (all the way back to VC v4.2, 6, 7/2003, and 8/2005) to be the IDE environment!

Anyways, I digress…

Well, back when I installed this tab feature for IE, it was buggy…  When it was working, the tab was the greatest thing, and I agree with all the users who are fans of Firefox tabs why this is a great thing!  Just have one browser open with multiple pages, how convinient is that?  Anyways, because it was buggy, I’ve uninstalled it and forgot about it wishing for the day to see IE7 when the feature will be part of the application.

Just recently, I have bumped into http://toolbar.live.com (or http://toolbar.msn.com) which doesn’t advertise as any sort of beta.  So I went ahead and installed it again in hopes to enjoy all the spoilings which Firefox users receives.

Although they advertise that this toolbar is for XP or 2003 Server with IE6, I wasn’t able to get it working on 2003 Server (at work).  But I was able to install it successfully on my XP loaner-laptop from work.

So I went wild and opened up multiple tabs for work e-mail, work wiki which I do personal documentations for other developers to read, MSDN, QA page, etc.  And even set up the multiple tabs which I relate as work-related as “My Tabs” so I can open all work related pages in a single click.  How wonderful! But…

One thing I know is that all applications will crash once in a while.  And I have in many times had to forcefully close IE down before I had no tabs.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this now…

I have multiple tabs open, all pointing to currently important pages, being efficient to multi-task and bamf!  One of the JavaScript (AJAX and/or JSON) based page crashes…  Eats up 99% of my CPU process, sits there for ever…  No choice but to close it via Task Manager and guess what?  All tabs are gone…

I could swear that the beta version had this “Open Last Tabs” or something which if the IE crashed, if I re-opened the IE and clicked on it, it would come back to the last pages open on each tabs but this seems to have disappeared…

I love the tabs, but I think I’ll still open a new browser rather than a tab and clutter my desktop because I can be spending my time being productive than to go to my History and re-open all those pages again.

 

Addendum: I stand corrected, there is a “Open Last Viewed Tags” as part of the pull-down menu.

Also, if the page offers “Close Window” or some option to close the explorer and you have multiple tabs open, I’ve found it to crash so don’t click on methods to close window and close that tab manually yourself!

 

Addendum (10.18.2006): So just few more experiences I’ve had since the tabbing has been added…

It turns out if one of the tabs crashes and you have multiple IExplorers open (not just tabs, but multiple instances), and you forcefully close that crashed IExplorer, it’ll close all IExplorer…  But then again, we’ve been used to that, aren’t we?

Then there is that disappearance issue.  You open one too many tabs or that page does not act as expected and it causes the focus to that page only and the other tabs and toolbars disappears.  And because there is no methods except for the buttons on the toolbar to access the tabs (I’m not sure if Ctrl-Tab works), you no longer can see them.  And this issue is not page specific.  It happens on any pages including MSDN pages, so my suspicions are number of tabs opened (commonly it happens to me at about 5 or 6 tabs) but it can also be due to page-time-out or network disconnection.  By the way, use Ctrl-Tab to switch between tabs and Ctrl-F4 to close the currently viewed tab (just like Visual Studio).

I’m not trying to bash Microsoft, because I fully (and have always) understood that larger the application software becomes, more bugs will crop up.  More you try to make that application handle multiple purpose (in Anti-Patterns, this may be catagorized as “Swiss Army Knife”?) more edge-cases you’ll have and creates unexpected effects and bugs.  I just read on Microsoft newsletter that IE7 is coming up for auto-update (mainly for security).  Hopefully, IE7 will have all these fixes.

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