Even if you think you’ve never used a tab, you probably have. Browser tabs were fashioned after tab top manila folders — the same kind you use in a filing cabinet. Just like tabs allow you to quickly see the topic of the folder, they also enable you to quickly grab that folder out of the stack for easy perusal.
Web pages are like “folders” containing lots of useful info. (You could also think of them as pages in the largest book in the world, which is why you need “bookmarks.”) Sometimes, you want to work in more than one folder at a time, or you don’t want to put a folder back into the filing cabinet yet so you are reminded to complete something within it.
Once upon a time you used to have to have different browser windows open (like in Safari, Chrome or Firefox) to have different websites open. Now you can have many websites open in one window using tabs. Tabs are a great way to manage many sites at once when you need to cross check different things. (Bill pay and bank site anyone?)
These are instructions for Chrome but the others will work very similarly.
- Start by opening your browser.
- Once you open your browser, you should see a plus sign next to the name of the website you are on. This is where you can open a new tab and open a different website so that both are available to you at once, by flipping back and forth using the “tabs” at the top.
You can right click on one of the browser tabs to pin it open. (This is not the same as favorites.) Once you pin it the tab will condense and move to the left but still be available via a tinier tab. You can typically close Safari/Chrome and the tabs will return when you open the browser again. The downside to keeping many tabs open is that it will take more computing power, so we recommend only keeping open the tabs you are using.
Bonus Tip: If you ever lose a site, you can click the 3 dots next to the address bar and click history to find any site you’ve been on recently.
Want to learn some other great tips to make the internet easier to navigate? Check out this post here about Bookmarks.
Want help making this change to your system? Digital Helpmates offers one-on-one tech tutoring to home and business users at affordable prices. Find out more about our dedicated tech tutoring and Jumpstart Office Teams at https://digitalhelpmates.com.
