Foxit Reader 2.3 has just been released, and not only is it quicker and lighter on system resources than Adobe Reader, but the latest version adds a ton of useful features like tabbed viewing. For some reason tabs took the web browser world by storm a few years ago, but failed to catch on in other applications. But if you spend a lot of time reading PDF files, we don't have to tell you how much less clutter you have on your desktop when you open your documents in tabs instead of separate program windows.
In addition to tabbed viewing, Foxit 2.3 adds:
Bookmarks
Multimedia playback in PDF files
Text tool for adding comments to documents
Rulers for aligning documents properly
Magnifier for zooming in portions of a document
Automatic scrolling
Improved ability to print just a selected area of a document
Are you sick of having multiple tabs open at one time because you have numerous items that you want to read or research? The Taboo Firefox extension will help cure your "tabitis" (their term, not ours, so don't hate on it) and minimize the glut of tabs on your tab bar.
Once Taboo is installed, you'll have two new items on your toolbar. When you click the first button, Taboo will take a snapshot of any web page you are on, including session state information (such as the scroll location and any data you've entered into forms), and store it for later. You can do this with as many tabs as you need.
When you want access to one of your saved tabs, click on the other Taboo button, and Taboo will load thumbnails of your saved pages into a new tab. From there, all you need to do is click on a saved page, and it will automatically load, complete with scroll location and any text you may have entered.
The saved pages are kept through browsing sessions and shutdowns, and for as many days as you like. Taboo even has a calendar view of all your saved tabs, if you want to access pages from days or weeks ago. You can also search among your pages using the url or page title as a keyword.
Taboo requires Firefox 2, and isn't yet compatible with the Firefox 3 beta.
Not happy with the way the Opera web browser handles tabbed browsing? Just download the latest snapshot of Opera 9.5 beta. The newest build includes advanced tab management features that let you choose how Opera reacts when you close a tab. When you close a tab, you can decide whether to activate the last active tab, activate the tab to the right, or the first tab opened from closing tab. In other words, you can make Opera act a bit more like Firefox, Safari, or other web browsers.
Opera already had other tab management features, like the ability to drag and drop tabs to arrange them in your browser. If you drag a tab outside of the Opera window, you can even load that page in a new browser session.
The new tab management option is the sort of thing we don't expect most users to need or even notice. But advanced customization features are one of the areas where Opera really shines. Now if it could just render every web page we visit as well as Firefox or Internet Explorer, we'd be truly happy.
It's happened to us all: we've gone a little bit trigger happy with our mouse, and inadvertently closed a tab that we didn't want closed. We've recently covered a way to get those tabs back with Firefox. Now, with IE7 Open Last Closed Tab, those regrettable clicks can be undone in Internet Explorer 7 as well.
The add-on is small, simple to install, and does what it says, all qualities to be adored. Once you download and install the add-on, IE will look and act the same as before. If you need to open a closed tab, you have two keyboard options:
Alt+X will restore the last closed tab, complete with history.
Alt+Q will bring up a screen to let you select from all your recently closed tabs (up to 200!).
A heads up: there are Amazon advertisements that load on the screen where you can select from your closed tabs. However, you can easily turn them off by clicking the "disable product bar" option on the top of the tab.
IE7 Open Last Closed Tab requires Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Server 2003, XP, or Vista.
Have you ever had 15 tabs open and wished you had opened them in a different order? People that visit certain sites with regularity and despise it when the tabs aren't in their usual order, will enjoy the sheer simplicity of this Firefox tip. Unbeknownst to most, Firefox actually allows you to drag and drop tabs wherever you want to.
Just click on the tab that is out of place or otherwise out of line, and drag it to the area on the tab bar you want it to be at. A little purple arrow will help you find the right spot. Drop it and rearrange other tabs as necessary. Before you know it, your tabs will all be where they should without even requiring an extension or plug-in to accomplish the task.
It's little treats like these that get us fired up about what Firefox 3 holds in store for us. If you're looking for more Firefox and browser tips, remember to check the DownloadSquad search.
It happens to everyone, and it's annoying. Sometimes the wrong tab gets closed in Firefox, but it's OK. There's a solution to the problem, and it comes in the form of CTRL + SHIFT + T in Windows or COMMAND + SHIFT + T in Mac OS X.
We've covered other solutions in the past such as Unclosetab, a Firefox extension that adds a right-click option to reopen a closed tab. Another easy way to reopen a closed tab is simply to visit the Recently Closed Tabs menu under History.
And if you'd like to close the tab currently up, CTRL + W or COMMAND + W should do the trick. Now you have no excuse for your lady to catch you browsing the Apple Store late at night.
When you go to set up a new computer, there's always your list of "essential" applications; i.e., applications you simply cannot function without. For some the first install is Firefox and its most-loved extensions. Maybe it's Outlook and your mail account. Hopefully there's an Antivirus application thrown in there somewhere.
When it comes to a Mac, there's one essential plugin that rules them all.
Saft adds an incredible amount of customizable options to Safari: draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, auto-hiding the downloads window, plain copy, tab thumbnails, and so on. It even has ad and image blocking built in (though we've found that Safari 3 AdBlock works better at that function, at least for now).
Saft even covers the little things. For example, if you wanted a new tab in Firefox, you just double-click the tab bar, and voila, a new tab. With Safari, you have to use a keyboard shortcut to get a new tab. (For some people, that is an improvement; but some are clickers, and some are clackers). With Saft installed, no problem. You might call Saft the "Firefoxer" of Safari.
Saft has just been updated for Safari version 3.0.4. It seems that Apple's last security update for Mac OS X Leopard broke Saft temporarily. Thankfully, that issue has been speedily resolved in Saft 10.0.4.
Simply put, Safari without Saft is like Derek Zoolander without Blue Steel. We'll let you figure out the implications of that.
You can download Saft as a trial or register for a reasonable fee of $12.
We broke the news the beginning of this year that Yahoo! was busy preparing a complete rebuild of Messenger made exclusively for Windows Vista users. The ground up rebuild has taken quite a long time (11 months), but it's finally here.
Yahoo! Messenger for Vista is officially available as a preview download starting today. There are some important features that are missing in this build, but the significant additions might make up for the lack of features. The changes in Yahoo! Messenger include a complete change of layout, skin chooser, filter-as-you-type for easy searching, spell checker and a convenient tabbed conversation window that controls your desktop clutter. The rebuild also incorporates sidebar graphics that have the ability to show favorite contacts separated from conversation windows. Graphical elements in the new IM take Microsoft's graphic subsystem into play for vector based interfaces and enhanced emoticons. IM's can now be conveniently sent to both Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger contacts, complete with up to 2GB worth of files.
There are a few features that have been left out of this build that are scheduled for a later date. They are big ones that people do expect to have, be it a beta build or any release and include voice, webcam, chat rooms, text messaging to mobile devices, photo sharing and conferencing. To grab a copy of the new Yahoo! Messenger for Vista preview release, visit http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php We will have more on this application as we put it through the DLS wringer.
Check out some screenshots of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview in the gallery.
Pocket Internet Explorer has a lot in common with Internet Explorer for the desktop. It might not be the best web browser for the platform, but it's the one that comes with the operating system, so most people use it. If you've got a Windows Mobile phone or PDA and want quicker page rendering, tabbed browsing, or support for Flash video, you're best off installing Opera Mobile.
But if you're looking for a cheaper (as in free) solution, Web Viewer might be the way to go. Web Viewer is a free add-on for Pocket Internet Explorer that adds tabbed browsing and replaces some of the navigation buttons at the button of PIE.
Tabbed browsing is just the start. The application also remembers closed tabs and typed URLS, and has full screen and page source viewing options.
You'll need Windows Mobile 5.0 and Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 to run Web Viewer.
Informational Tab is one of those Firefox add-ons that could either make your web browsing experience a whole lot easier, or a whole lot more difficult.
Essentially, this add-on puts two things in your tab menu: a thumbnail of the pages your visiting and a progress bar showing their page loading progress.
The thumbnails are necessarily tiny. But they do provide more information in some cases than the favicons that are typically listed. For example, if you visit several blogs hosted on Blogspot or Wordpress.org, they'll all have identical favicons. But the thumbnails will have different colors for each site.
But that's still a lot of information to be putting into such a small space. And while Informational Tab might make it easier to identify sites by eyeballing your tab bar, it also tends to make Firefox a bit uglier than it needs to be. Plus Informational Tab doesn't play that well with Faviconize, an add-on that lets you shrink your tabs to fit more on the screen. The problem is that shrunken tabs are smaller than the thumbnails created by Informational Tab, so you wind up with thumbnails spilling over onto the next tab.
Ryan from Cybernet tagged us, so now we have to come up with 5 suggestions for improving the Opera web browser. There are a lot of things to love about Opera. The company makes one of the finest mobile web browsers around. And the desktop version renders pages quickly and has a great fit-to-screen feature. But there are some web pages that still don't work properly in Firefox.
In no particular order, here are 5 things that would make Opera a better browser:
Opera added tabs long before Internet Explorer. That's great. But when you've only got one window open, the tab toolbar takes up more screen space than you need. Why not make tabs work the same way as they do in Firefox. The toolbar only pops up when you open your second tab.
Why do we have to visit the Opera website every time a new version is released. There should be an auto-updater.
Support for 3rd party add-ons/extensions
An integrated spell-checker
Integrate widgets more tightly with the browser experience. Not that we really need widgets anchored to the browser, but the way Opera handles widgets now, they're pretty much just like Yahoo Widgets or Vista Gadgets running in the background.
Tabs are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Firefox, Opera, and even Internet Explorer allow you to open multiple browser windows without seeing thousands of icons in your taskbar. But have you ever wished you could use tabs for everything?
That's what WinTabber is for -- kind of. It doesn't let you add tabs to tab-free programs like your favorite photo editor or multimedia program. Instead, it lets you load applications into the WinTabber environment and navigate between applications as tabs.
In one way, this make sense. Most programs have toolbars located at the top of the screen. So that's where you spend the most time scrolling your mouse around. Why move to the bottom of the page to switch between applications? The problem is that WinTabber has a fairly hefty toolbar of its own. When you install it, you'll notice it eats up a sizeable chunk of space on your screen.
Of course, you could always just move your taskbar to the top of your screen to get a similar effect. Or you could use the default Gnome environment in Linux. WinTabber is Windows only.
There are many advantages to designing with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely easy to learn and rework once a basic site framework has been established. Websites, or website components can easily be changed into something totally different just by swapping a single CSS file, or a line within a CSS file.
CSS designers always seem to have a few different elements that they commonly use over and over in all designs, these can include navigation elements and form fields, among other items. Smashing Magazine has compiled a list of 53 CSS Techniques that you couldn't live without, linking out to tutorials on CSS navigation, tabbed navigation, bar graphs, rounded corners, hover effects, image map, submit buttons, custom bullets, and sidenotes. Whether you are new to CSS, or have been in it for a while, these are some great tutorials to have archived as reference materials.
I like Tab Effect, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's useful. It's an extension for Firefox that adds a sort of rotating cube effect when you switch tabs. It's powered by DirectX 8, so it'll only work on Windows, and how well it performs may depend upon the quality of your graphics card. My graphics card, for example, is a piece of crap, which may be why Tab Effect performs a tad sluggishly. There's a slight delay after clicking on a tab and when the effect kicks in, and the rotation is a slower than I'd like.
Like I said, I'm not sure how useful Tab Effect is, but it's definitely a cool concept. We've seen this sort of effect with desktop-switching before, so tab-switching is a natural progression, but as it stands it's pretty limited. But it's only 1.0, so maybe after a few revisions it'll be mind-blowingly speedy, intuitive, and useful.
Path Finder is the uber-replacement for the Mac OS X Finder which has many features (and forethought) that the stock Finder could use. Even after its shiny metal facelift in Mac OS X 10.3, the Finder has felt very little in the way of new features or changes as of late, much like a cute puppy whose name you can't remember. My favorite features of Path Finder are its tabs, the drop stack, the integrated Terminal panel and the wicked Select tool. It can feel a bit foreign to switch from the Finder to something new, but if you are determined I bet you can make it through the 21-day free trial without much trouble. As Merlin Mann shows, you can either have as much "frippery" enabled as you want, or you can play it simple and straightforward.
With WWDC just around the corner and Mac OS X Leopard details gently leaking around the Web, what do you Download Squad readers think would be a good addition to the Mac OS X Finder? What features, no matter how crazy you think they are, do you think would be a valuable addition? Or should it stay simple and sweet, leaving the talented third parties to take it to the next step?
It's happened to us all: we've gone a little bit trigger happy with our mouse, and inadvertently closed a tab that we didn't want closed. We've recently covered a way to get those tabs back with Firefox. Now, with IE7 Open Last Closed Tab, those regrettable clicks can be undone in Internet Explorer 7 as well. 
Have you ever had 15 tabs open and wished you had opened them in a different order? People that visit certain sites with regularity and despise it when the tabs aren't in their usual order, will enjoy the sheer simplicity of this Firefox tip. Unbeknownst to most, Firefox actually allows you to drag and drop tabs wherever you want to.
When you go to set up a new computer, there's always your list of "essential" applications; i.e., applications you simply cannot function without. For some the first install is Firefox and its most-loved extensions. Maybe it's Outlook and your mail account. Hopefully there's an Antivirus application thrown in there somewhere. 
Pocket Internet Explorer has a lot in common with Internet Explorer for the desktop. It might not be the best web browser for the platform, but it's the one that comes with the operating system, so most people use it. If you've got a Windows Mobile phone or PDA and want quicker page rendering, tabbed browsing, or support for Flash video, you're best off installing Opera Mobile.
Informational Tab is one of those Firefox add-ons that could either make your web browsing experience a whole lot easier, or a whole lot more difficult.
Ryan from Cybernet tagged us, so now we have to come up with 5 suggestions for improving the Opera web browser. There are a lot of things to love about Opera. The company makes one of the finest mobile web browsers around. And the desktop version renders pages quickly and has a great fit-to-screen feature. But there are some web pages that still don't work properly in Firefox.
There are many advantages to designing with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely easy to learn and rework once a basic site framework has been established. Websites, or website components can easily be changed into something totally different just by swapping a single CSS file, or a line within a CSS file. 
I like Tab Effect, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's useful. It's an extension for Firefox that adds a sort of rotating cube effect when you switch tabs. It's powered by DirectX 8, so it'll only work on Windows, and how well it performs may depend upon the quality of your graphics card. My graphics card, for example, is a piece of crap, which may be why Tab Effect performs a tad sluggishly. There's a slight delay after clicking on a tab and when the effect kicks in, and the rotation is a slower than I'd like.
Path Finder is the uber-replacement for the Mac OS X Finder which has many features (and forethought) that the stock Finder could use. Even after its shiny metal facelift in Mac OS X 10.3, the Finder has felt very little in the way of new features or changes as of late, much like a cute puppy whose name you can't remember. My favorite features of Path Finder are its tabs, the drop stack, the integrated Terminal panel and the wicked Select tool. It can feel a bit foreign to switch from the Finder to something new, but if you are determined I bet you can make it through the 21-day free trial without much trouble. As Merlin Mann shows, you can either have as much "frippery" enabled as you want, or you can play it simple and straightforward. 
