My faith in Firefox shaken, but just for a moment

I’ve been exploring the latest features of Internet Explorer 8, not because I’m an IE user, but because I need to know the product in order to teach it. I was surprised to discover a new feature that suddenly had me wondering if my trusted Firefox browser was falling behind in features.

I’m talking about tab groups. In IE8, if you perpetually find yourself opening the same group of web sites in separate tabs over and over when you start your browser or whenever, this new feature helps immensely. Let’s say that every time you open your browser, you typically go to all of your favourite news web sites. Let's say you always open CBC, CNN, CTV and Wired in 4 individual tabs. Well, with tab groups, you can set up these tabs once and while they’re still open in your browser, you choose the down arrow next to Add to Favourites, and select the second option to ‘Add Current Tabs to Favourites’. Then you simply enter a name for the Tab Group, and a new folder appears in the favourites list. When you want to open the Tab Group, simply go to Favourites and hover the mouse over the Tab Group folder name, then click the blue arrow at the right hand side. This opens all of the sites in the group instantly, each in their own tab.

Well, it turns out my trusty Firefox was able to do this little trick all along. In Firefox, you create your multiple tab experience, then go to the Bookmarks menu and choose the item ‘Bookmark All Tabs’. Then just name your Bookmark folder and you’re done. The next time you want to open each of these tabs together, go back to the Bookmarks menu, select the folder and choose ‘Open all in Tabs’.

What a time saver!