How the web works

Or “The advantage of tabbed browsing”.

Before I start this is NOT a pro-Firefox post but I will be mentioning it as it’s my browser of choice. There are other browser that offer tabbed browsing.

Anyway, I was just randomly surfing when a post on Caterina’s site caught my eye. It’s about the book “Getting Things Done” which I’ve seen mentioned at 43 Folders and have on my Amazon wishlist, she links to a particular post on the 43 Folders website that itself contains several related links: a summary of the GTD methodology, a PDF of an annotated workflow of the method, another site with a more Windows based slant on some of the productivity solutions and the website for the man who wrote the book and started the cult of GTD (to uses Caterina’s phrase).

Caterina also mentions her new love for a certain brand of notebook, and offers a link to another blog post about them from where I find a link to a reseller of Caterina’s notebooks of choice and to the oft mentioned moleskin notepads.

Phew.

So why is this particular to tabbed browsing? Because I no longer need to move back and forward (or between open windows) to see the links between these sites as I used to do when attempting something like this using a single browser window (and you techies can keep your semantic definitions of windows to yourself, thank you very much). Maybe a quick screenshot will be better than my attempts to describe this.

Tabs opened in Firefox

It may LOOK confusing but you can follow my surfing thread from left to right, from Caterina through 43 Folders, GTD specific sites, on through David Allen’s site and to the moleskin notebooks.

And THAT, ladies and gentlepeeps (and everyone else inbetween) is why tabbed browsing is a good thing.

Now I just need to find a Firefox extension that will let me produce a list of all open tabs, and their URLs, and I’m a happy, although still knackered, bunny.

(And yes I’m aware of Session Saver but it doesn’t let you generate a list of the tabs stored)

This is all very much an excellent example of how a technology has been mapped to the way people work. Information design, if you will.