I've been using FireFox as my primary web browser for a while (since the official 1.0 release) and I really love it. I've used Safari on my mac at home for a while and the tabbed browsing thing has always been great, but I think until I started running FireFox at work (on a PC) I never realized what a difference-maker the tabs can be. At home I might spend at most an hour on the computer at a time, so I never really pushed the limits on this. But at work I can be on the computer for up to 10 hours at a time, so the rules are changed.

Back in my formidable IE days if I was browsing and wanted to look at something else, but not close the page I was on I'd open the link in a new window. This happens a lot when you're reading blogs or news sites - you want to scan the entries and click on links that might have some appeal to you - but you want to stay on the main page and skim it only once, then move on to the new windows you opened. So I might have upwards of 4-6 browser windows open and at that point it started to feel unmanageable - like it was information overload.

Now though, with FireFox, I routinely find myself with anywhere between 10 and 20 tabs open at a time (as of this writing I have 11 tabs open). The crazy thing is I don't feel like this is information overload - even though there is as much as 4 times more information there than the separate IE windows. It starts early in the morning for me as I skim some news sites - maybe Yahoo News. I'll go to the Most Popular and maybe open 5 articles in new tabs to read. Then I'll scan the Charlotte Observer online and open up some more tabs. Then I'll scan the sports sites - ESPN, FoxSports, Sportsline, NFL.com, an open up some more links in new tabs. Then I'll knock out some blogs - Dooce, Kottke, etc.... So to start my day I might have 20 tabs. But I don't read them all immediately - I'll let them stew and simmer over the course of the morning, taking breaks from my work to read a few here and there. A visit to Kottke's site might create me 8 new tabs some days, some days 1 or 2. Sometimes at the end of the day tabs from the morning are still open and I'll give each tab a good reading before going home.

It's crazy to think this one little feature - tabs - can make such a big difference - but the difference is bigger than the feature - it didn't just change the way we open new content, it changed the way we consume the content.