Grassroots works! MS IE to do "tabbed browsing"

[Alexander Turcic]

From Pride Of Lions: As a Safari guy, I've been digging tabbed browsing for a while, but the PC crowd should rejoice that Microsoft is willing to be flexible (even if it's only in response to their losing marketshare, mindshare, installshare, and/or money). From webpronews: Late yesterday evening, Microsoft let out an updated MSN Search Toolbar for download with the added feature of tabbed browsing for Internet Explorer 6. The echoes of "why didn't we think of this earlier?" were still ripe in the Redmond campus hallways. Mozilla was reported to have snickered.

[hacker]

The irony of "tabbed browsing" in MSIE is that all of the users who will want to use it, will be asking for features that they're already used to in Safari, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and other better implementations.

"Please let me middle-click to send the link to a background tab."

"You have to let me disable tabs also, so they're not there all the time."

"If I can't drag tabs around and reorder them, don't bother."

Its going to be interesting to see how they do this. The developers have already mentioned in their MSN blogs that they're going to be a very limited use of tabs, with end-user features coming later.

I suspect they're going to cripple it like they do with everything they "create", and only allow specific events to use tabs. You can bet within hours, someone will find a way to hijack the tabs and do some neat ActiveX tricks to make you think a tab points to one thing when it actually points to another (more phishing scams, no-doubt).

Have you seen Longhorn yet?

1. The Start Menu is a direct ripoff of OSX's Finder, where you can navigate left and right through your root -> directory -> files heirarchy
2. Their Control Panel is a direct ripoff of several Linux control panels, most-notably KDE's new version.
3. Their "theme" is a direct ripoff of Safari (navigation buttons) and the "brushed aluminum" look of many of OSX's windows and frames.

There's a lot more if you dig deeper, but its funny to see them in "reactive" mode, just copying as much as they can to stay "similar" to the other alternatives out there. They're not innovating at all, and haven't in years.

Nothing to see here, move along now...