Chris Meller

Mark Jen is back from the dead (finally!), and he’s not disappointing us in the slightest!

Even before I read this post just now, I’d read the original source on Scoble’s blog. Basically the entire point of the story is that Internet Explorer 7 will have tabbed browsing, according to the development team at Microsoft.

This doesn’t really mean all that much to me, since I’m a loyal Firefox user (even though I would really like to be able to use Internet Explorer, for various reasons), but the one thing Mark brought up that really interested me was this clip:

I don’t know how much thought they actually put into it, but my question is, why isn’t there tabbed browsing everywhere? Hey Longhorn shell team, if you’re listening out there: I want tabbed Windows Explorer as well. I can’t tell you how many Explorer windows I have open when I’m copying files around, organizing music, etc. I hope the tabbed design permeates through many other experiences.

What an amazing idea! I’d never thought about this before, but it’s absolutely wonderful!

Just think about it, how many documents do you have open at a time? How many e-mails? IM windows? I typically have pretty much a huge mess on my taskbar. 5 x Word, 8 x Outlook, 3 x IE, 3 x Firefox, 15 x IM, Photoshop, Illustrator, 40 x Notepad… I think you get the idea ;)

Not only do I constantly have 5 to 10 Explorer windows open, but I also absolutely hate how Office 2003 opens new windows for each of your documents. Tabs would kick some major ass throughout the rest of the Windows world. IMs (at least in Trillian and GAIM) already support tabs, but I see no reason we couldn’t expand this idea to Outlook for separate email messages or Word and Excel for documents. As for notepad, I’ve already solved that problem with the far superior TextPad, which has tab support built in.

Gee, maybe you should disappear more often Mark… You make some great points when you finally show back up.