Charles Arthur: High browse

It's a truism these days to say that the web has changed the way we work, and how we communicate when we're not working. As a journalist dealing with science and technology, I have certainly benefited from the the explosion of useful information, which was linked to the rise of powerful search engines (initially AltaVista, and then Google when the former lost its way horribly).

But the web is now a powerful resource for all of us, whether you're looking up crochet patterns, dealing with webmail, or using the chat areas that so many websites offer.

I'm always surprised, though, by how naive most people's use of a web browser is. They remain trapped in what I call the "one-window syndrome". They start with a browser page. To follow a link that leads off it, they click and wait for the new page to load, completely erasing what they were reading so intently a moment ago. While the page loads, they can't do anything. And if they're not interested by what the link turns up, they have to hit the Back button and sit around again.

How daft is this? It's like being in a library and seeing an interesting reference in the book you're reading, filing that book back on the shelf and then asking the librarian to go and get you the referred-to book, while you twiddle your thumbs. Smart – if your time is worthless.

Many people do pass that stage (if you haven't, join us now) and realise that they can get that link they are following to open in a new window. On Windows machines, right-click on a link, and see the pop-up menu that appears: on Apple Macs, click while holding the Command key on the left of the space-bar. Great! Now you can keep the page that you originally had, and follow the link – the equivalent, roughly, of sticking your fingers in the book and asking the librarian to get the one being referred to. If you click back on the original window, you can carry on reading the original while the referred-to page loads up.

A very few people reach the next stage, which is only available in certain browsers. This is to open a new window in the background, so that we can carry on reading, while our metaphorical librarian goes and fetches the books, and piles them beside us, open at just the place we want to read them. Very neat. And it makes the Back button almost obsolete; just close the unwanted window.

Opera can do this, as can Mozilla (the open-source version of Netscape). The new Netscape (version 6 and 7) should be able to, as it shares its essential code with Mozilla. Among Macintosh-only browsers, iCab (www.icab.de) can, as does Apple's new Safari browser – for both, the key sequence is to click the link while holding the Shift and Command buttons. (In iCab, you can also click and hold, and a menu comes up.)

Windows users of Internet Explorer, who might be tempted to laugh at the contortions required of Mac users, should consider this: the most widely-used browser on the planet doesn't offer this immensely useful feature.

With background linking, surfing becomes cruising. There's just one problem: multiple background windows can quickly turn into a mess. I frequently have more than 20 open at once. Moving through them can become challenging. It's also sometimes hard to remember why you opened a page. Was it as a link from that thing about the space project, or on privacy? And your task-bar or windows menu quickly becomes cluttered. Something better is needed.

The next stage of development is called "tabbed browsing", a concept unveiled by Netscape in May last year with version 7.0. (Some say that Opera introduced it in 2000, but it wasn't true tabbed browsing.) When you click on a new link using a key combination, the page you want starts loading in a separate "tab" – a window alongside, but hidden by, the one you're reading, and within the same main window.

Each tab carries the title of its page, and they are added from left to right as the pages are called, meaning that you can follow where you were in your reading from the tab order. To read a tab window, you click on it (or do a keyboard gymnastic): it comes to the foreground, but remains in its left-to-right place.

This is marvellous when you're researching parallel topics: you can still have new windows, with many related tabs in each. It's a killer feature. But so far only Opera, Netscape and Mozilla have it in official versions – though I have acquired a version of Apple's Safari that just happens to have tabbed browsing, a second feature that Internet Explorer hasn't. If you use the web a lot, you might want to ask yourself whether it's time to change.

What's your favourite user interface invention? E-mail your candidates to network@independent.co.uk

In a future column, I intend to investigate Linux for the average user. Send your suggestions, please, for which is presently the best distribution for a non-expert to install and use.