By LEROY MCLEAN, Contributor
MICROSOFT HAS ANNOUNCED that the next version of Internet Explorer (IE 7) will finally support tabbed browsing, a feature long available in competing browsers such as Firefox and Opera.
While the beta of IE 7 is expected to be released within the next couple of months, you can have tabbed browsing today without needing to switch browsers (if IE is still your favourite), using the MSN Toolbar. The latest version of the MSN Toolbar now supports tabbed browsing in IE.
You can download the latest version of the MSN Toolbar at http://toolbar.msn.com/. Once you've downloaded and installed the toolbar, restart IE and you should see the new tabbed-browsing toolbar.
Add Tab
Once the MSN toolbar is installed on your computer, you can add a tab, click on the Add Tab button. A new tab will then appear, and you can proceed to load the new tab with the page you want to visit by typing the URL in the address bar.
The MSN Toolbar includes a feature known as My Tabs. My Tabs contains a list of sites that will be opened in various tabs. For example, you may visit certain sites regularly every morning (such as CNN.com, CNET.com, or The New York Times). In this case, it is useful to save the URLs of all these sites in My Tabs so that they can be displayed with the single click of a button.
If you switched off tabbed browsing and want it back, go to the MSN Search Toolbar options to bring back the MSN Search Toolbar Options window. Check the "Turn on tabbed browsing" check box and click on OK. You'll need to relaunch IE to bring back tabbed browsing.
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