How To Hide Yourself While Browsing The Web?

In the development of a web browser software, is tabbed browsing an improvement, or a step backward?

• The taskbar, as it appeared in versions of Windows up to and including Windows XP, allowed each instance of a running application to appear as a small bar that included a description of the instance, e.g., "Mozilla Firefox – Quora."  Thus, one could run multiple instances of a web browser and see each instance clearly displayed on the taskbar.  This method of accessing multiple webpages simultaneously and switching between them was simpler and less needlessly redundant than running a single instance of the browser, which appeared in the taskbar, and then referring to that instance to manage access to each of several webpages through tabbed browsing.  Under such circumstances, tabbed browsing might still be worthwhile for users who were using many other applications at the same time that they browsed the web.  For those users, the taskbar would be so cluttered that tabbed browsing might be a useful way of transferring the record of the webpages that the user was currently visiting to the browser interface and isolating it there.  For all others, however, avoiding tabbed browsing would be simpler, less redundant, and would occupy less screen space. I would argue that the diminution of the taskbar in Windows 7 and its elimination in Windows 8 were the result of the introduction of tabbed browsing in web browser software that occurred before those operating systems were released.  Since these changes to the taskbar were arguably brought about because of the introduction of tabbed browsing, we cannot easily dismiss the question by saying that tabbed browsing is unworkable in Windows 7 or Windows 8.

• Answer:

  Tabbed user interface , in general, is a good thing. It wasn't introduced by browsers, though. Excel had it before and maybe some other applications. You can find tabs elsewhere, maybe not for the main content of the application but in setting dialogs, tabs became popular long before. Tabbed UI makes it easier to navigate between multiple websites, excel sheets, finder windows, or even Ms office ribbon menus because you stay, visually, in the same context (window). Adjustments made by the taskbar are normal evolutions in UI. At roughly the same time, smart mobile devices arose - speaking iOS. You wouldn't be able to browse multiple websites on an iPad in parallel if there were no tabs.