Help me not hate IE8?
October 8, 2009 8:15 AM Subscribe
How do I make IE8 suck less? Specifically, I hate the way it handles tabs.
I've been using tabbed browsing for 10 years and have gotten used to doing things a particular way. Tabs on top, new unrelated tabs opened at the far right, new related tabs opened to the immediate right of whichever tab they were opened from, etc.
At work, I have to use Internet Explorer. We've just upgraded to IE8 this week, and my tabs are a mess. I've been using IE7Pro to help manage tabs in IE (and add some other functionality like URL blocking), and I updated it after updating IE, but my tabs are a mess and the option to select whether new tabs open at the end or next to the current tab seems to have disappeared. Now they all open at the end and it's harder for me to manage the tabs.
IE8 introduces "tab groups", which may be the only way to keep my tabs where they're supposed to be, but the tab groups have stupid distracting colors on the tabs, and my Attention Deficit ... Look, A Bunny! brain keeps sending my eyes up to look at the shiny colored tabs instead of the pages, so I turned off tab groups.
Also, IE7Pro used to handle reopening my last browser session after a close or a crash, but it no longer does that. Now, IE opens with my corporate home page and one seemingly randomly selected tab from my last browser session, and the menu on new tabs allows me to reopen my last session but requires that extra, annoying step. I haven't had a crash yet, so I don't know if either IE8 or IE7Pro will reopen my tabs after a crash.
What can I do to get my tabs back under control? Is there a competitor for IE7Pro that I should know about? Hidden registry options I could change to do away with the colors in tab groups? Some way to revert the system to IE7 and make the network vendor think it's on IE8 and in compliance? An updated TweakUI or similar that would let me fix it the way I like it?
I've been using tabbed browsing for 10 years and have gotten used to doing things a particular way. Tabs on top, new unrelated tabs opened at the far right, new related tabs opened to the immediate right of whichever tab they were opened from, etc.
At work, I have to use Internet Explorer. We've just upgraded to IE8 this week, and my tabs are a mess. I've been using IE7Pro to help manage tabs in IE (and add some other functionality like URL blocking), and I updated it after updating IE, but my tabs are a mess and the option to select whether new tabs open at the end or next to the current tab seems to have disappeared. Now they all open at the end and it's harder for me to manage the tabs.
IE8 introduces "tab groups", which may be the only way to keep my tabs where they're supposed to be, but the tab groups have stupid distracting colors on the tabs, and my Attention Deficit ... Look, A Bunny! brain keeps sending my eyes up to look at the shiny colored tabs instead of the pages, so I turned off tab groups.
Also, IE7Pro used to handle reopening my last browser session after a close or a crash, but it no longer does that. Now, IE opens with my corporate home page and one seemingly randomly selected tab from my last browser session, and the menu on new tabs allows me to reopen my last session but requires that extra, annoying step. I haven't had a crash yet, so I don't know if either IE8 or IE7Pro will reopen my tabs after a crash.
What can I do to get my tabs back under control? Is there a competitor for IE7Pro that I should know about? Hidden registry options I could change to do away with the colors in tab groups? Some way to revert the system to IE7 and make the network vendor think it's on IE8 and in compliance? An updated TweakUI or similar that would let me fix it the way I like it?
If there aren't any other solutions maybe you'll get used to the tab colors if you only tried it briefly before.
posted by 6550 at 11:20 AM on October 8, 2009
posted by 6550 at 11:20 AM on October 8, 2009
Response by poster: Firefox isn't an option. I'm stuck with IE, and hoping I'm not stuck with unmanageable tabs. I'd go back to tab groups if I could disable the colors (or manage the color palette and set it to shades of grey), but Google hasn't found me a way to do that yet.
posted by notashroom at 7:03 AM on October 9, 2009
posted by notashroom at 7:03 AM on October 9, 2009
« Older Good Winter Clothes for Toddlers | PowerShell: recursive processing of all files and... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by zsazsa at 9:31 AM on October 8, 2009