By “at once”, I meant “before looking at any of the other tabs”. Hold down the control key, go click, click, click, click, click, open result #1, examine, open result #2, examine, etc.

This is different from control-click, examine, go back to search results page, control-click on #2, examine #2, etc.

I’ll try to modify the text (*again*) to try and make clear what I’m talking about…

First off, I think I use both sequential and serial tabbing, depending on the situation. In the morning, I have firefox open a slew of tabs all at once – from the bookmarks menu – and go through them to take care of all the “do it in the morning tasks”.

When searching with google, I typically open any potentially interesting hit in a new tab and view it immediately, discarding it if it turns out to be unrelated or uninteresting. But if something is interesting I can – and do – leave the tab open to come back to it, so I regularly leave multiple tabs open when doing something complicated, like comparing different products, or sources of information about the same thing.

And I regularly use tabs to hold my place – so I can avoid using the back button to get back to something quickly.

But that being said, I know I fail as a geek because I see the references here to opening all search results in separate tabs at once and have no idea how to do that in firefox. There’s no menu choice to do that operation. At least, not that I am aware of.

I’ll leave my geek badge at the door…

I open search results in new tabs for several reasons. First, for speed, in that, as you mentioned, the pages can load in the background simultaneously. Second, it saves on mouse clicks: no need to click “back” repeatedly, especially if you click around on a page and then need to go back. Also, when you click “back”, you have to remember where you left off, plus you have to wait for the page to render (or reload in some cases). Finally, when I’m looking for something, it is often the case that no single page is what I’m looking for, and I need to combine information between multiple pages, which requires that the pages be open simultaneously for comparison purposes.

The newish Picasa Web Albums interface really annoys me in that it forces you into a serial browsing method. When you view an album in thumbnail view, you can’t open the photos in new tabs to zoom in on them. The original interface allowed this, but I guess it was a trade off with the dynamic loading of the thumbnails. Now, if I want to zoom in, I have to click on it, and then click back, and often you don’t get the same viewport when you return to the thumbnail view, so you have to scroll around to find where you left off. Very annoying interface.

Before tabbed browsers existed, I simply opened links in new windows, which led to an excessive number of windows open and a lot of alt-tabbing.