On 25 Aug 2004, at 12:40 AM, Mark D Lew wrote:
But since I've *always* read the web in a fashion that made multiple windows annoying, tabbed browsing was a huge annoyance. Some of my typical browsing scenarios: [examples snipped]
Hmm. Sounds confusing to me. My thinking is very linear. I want to read just one thing at a time, not bounce around between things.
But, Mark -- as I have told you before, that's exactly what tabbed browsing is good for! I only harp on this because this feature seems perfect for your reading habits.
Not to go through this again, but, well, okay, let's go through this again. Let's say I'm reading your blog:
<http://radio.weblogs.com/0134204/2004/08/22.html>
You have three links in the first sentence! Now, I don't want to follow all those links right away -- I want to finish reading what you've written here, and maybe catch up on some earlier posts (if it's been a while since I checked your blog).
But when I'm done that, and ready to check out those links from the first paragraph, ideally, I don't want to have to wait for them to load. Gee, if only there were some way I could have had them load in the background, so that they were ready to go by the time I'm ready to check them out...
Well, there is. In Safari, when I first see them, I just click on them with the middle mouse button (cmd-click if you don't have a multi-button mouse). They will open *in the background* in separate tabs, which is completely unobtrusive. When I'm ready to check them out, I can use the cmd-shift-arrow keys to switch between tabs, and cmd-W to close them when I'm done with them. [Or I can just use cmd-W to close the tab I was on, and Safari will automatically advance to the next one.]
Or let's say I'm reading a multi-page story in the New York Times online. When I get to the bottom of the first page, instead of just clicking the "next" button, I cmd-click the links for *all* of the subsequent pages. That way, while I'm reading Page 2 of the article, Pages 3 through X are all loading in the background, and then I don't have to wait around when I want to go to the next page -- I just go to the next tab.
This is also great for Google searches, where it can be hard to tell from the descriptions whether you'll find anything useful at that site or not. I just middle-click anything that looks promising, which means that while I'm checking out the first one, the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. are loading. Which means that I when I'm ready to check them out, I *don't have to wait for them to load, because they have already loaded in the background.* It also makes it *very* easy to go back to the Google search results page if I need to dig deeper into the results to find what I'm looking for in the first round.
I know you are incredibly resistant to changing the way you work once you've found a routine that works for you, and I respect that. It's just that tabbed browsing seems tailor-made for someone like you, someone who wants to finish reading one thing completely before going on to the next thing. But tell you what -- If you try using tabs the way I suggested above, and still find tabbed browsing is not to your liking, I promise I will never, ever bring it up again.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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