Agreed, Mozilla's middle click it the dogs b*llocks (that's good by the way :-). Although mine is configured to open a new window rather than a new tab - that whole Multi Document Interface thing was a failed experiment.

I disagree.

The purpose is to save taskbar space. When I'm at work, I usually have one adobe photoshop, at least three windows explorers, one ssh, dreamweaver, and a couple of gVims. So when I like to browse, I will end up with a hundred buttons on the taskbar. I can either group similar programs, but that's more confusing, or I can use (as I do now) Phoenix's tabs to have all the sites I'm visiting in a single window that I can easily find in between the whole mess on the taskbar, and doesn't get confused with everything else.

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He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

Chady | http://chady.net/

This may get a little off-topic, but out of curiosity, why do you think MDI is a failed experiment? I wouldn't want to live without it anymore (in fact, I have 10 tabs open in mozilla right now, and that's not even *that* much).

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mowgli

why do you think MDI is a failed experiment?

OK, that was a bit of an inflamatory stance :-). Let me explain ...

I almost always have multiple windows open. I prefer to Alt-Tab between my most recently used windows and almost never click on a task bar icon/button. The MDI interface breaks that functionality. Instead of thinking "I'll hit Alt-Tab 2 or 3 times until I get to what I want" I have to think "which application window is the document in?", Alt-Tab to that and then think "which client window is it in? and which hot key did the application vendor use for cylcing between open documents?" To make matters worse there is no standard for the hot keys and some applications always cycle through documents rather than using a most recently used stack.

I was under the impression that MDI was a Microsoft 'innovation' - although I'd be happy to be proved wrong. My first encounter with MDI was certainly with MS Word, Excel et al. The reason I say it was a failed experiment is that recent versions of Microsoft Office apps no longer default to MDI and in fact I don't think they even support it any more.

When Opera first came out, my first impression was oh dear thay've used that nasty MDI interface - and they seem to consider it a feature. Surely if MDI was such a good idea, Microsoft as it's principal proponent would have used it in their own browser.

It is certainly true that opening lots of top-level windows chews up icon space on the task bar. Perhaps that is a problem with the task bar rather than the windows - I don't know I don't use it.