Windows XP Taskbar Efficiency
I was at a friend’s house recently and was watching him navigate his own system. It occurred to me how much more efficient he could have set up his computer. I’ve often thought this when I’ve seen other people’s computers, so I thought I’d finally share some ways in which I try to be as efficient as possible. Hopefully, this will help save you some time each week.
The Windows taskbar is a great tool and can really save you a lot of time if you use it to its maximum potential. Otherwise, it is just a waste of precious screen space. In fact, this friend had his taskbar in the “auto-hide” mode which made sense partially because his taskbar wasn’t working that well for him.
Switching between Tabs in Internet Explorer 7
One of my early frustrations with IE7 is that there is no easy way to switch, as in toggle, between tabs. You can use Ctrl-Tab or Shift-Control-Tab to run up and down the available tabs. However, you must remember which way you are going as this is not a straight forward toggle. Second, unless the two tabs you need to switch back and forth from are immediately adjacent to each other, this is rather cumbersome.
Of course, you can put the other website in a new window (Ctrl-N) and then use the traditional Windows Alt-Tab keyboard shortcut as you always would, but this is yet another step and somewhat defeats the purpose of tabbed browsing. I’m all for learning a new hotkey if the IE team would create one to toggle between two tabs.
Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2
Downloaded the new IE7 available to the general public. My thoughts:
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Tabbed Browsing: Microsoft did a great job. The big news is that they finally have implemented tabbed browsing. I’ve used other IE alternatives over the years with this feature (MyIE2, NetCaptor, and of course Firefox as my alternate browser now) and it has been very useful.
- Mass Visitations: No, that’s not a Catholic thing - just my nickname for my favorite feature of tabbed browsers. You can create “group” folders within your favorites. If clicked on, all websites in that folder open up simultaneously in separate tabs within your browser. When job hunting, just create a list of all the job sites that you wish to check frequently, along with employer’s “job posting” websites and put them in one group. Sit down on a Sunday afternoon and click and “poof!” - you are halfway-done. Microsoft implemented this process by allowing you just to click a different icon on your folders already in your favorites to accomplish the same thing.