iCompass Technologies Blog

iCompass Customer Empowerment Series

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

 delicious  

  

The Power of Browsers

In part two of the Customer Empowerment series, I’d like to delve into how to effectively use a web browser. Most of us are spending a lot of time using web browsers in our everyday lives. Whether it’s for work, pleasure, Facebook or Meeting Management, we do a lot of things in our browser.

One of the easiest things you can do is learn how to use tabs properly. Some people refuse to acknowledge their existence and think they only serve as a troublemaker. However, you can use tabs to gain an incredible edge while using the web. Throughout the rest of this series, I’ll be providing you with shortcut keys and I’ll provide a quick reference at the end so you don’t have to write them all down.

To start learning how to use tabs the best thing to learn is a quick way to open new tabs. A lot of people don’t know that the mouse wheel on their mouse also serves as a third mouse button. If you press down on the mouse wheel you should feel and hear a click. The reason I’m telling you about this mysterious third mouse button is because if you middle-click on a link in your browser, it will open a new tab and go to the link you clicked on. An alternative to this shortcut is to hold control and press the left mouse button on a link. If you want to keep your current site opened and navigate to another site, you can press CTRL + T or click the icon to the right of the last tab in the list to open a new tab and go to the new site in that tab. Now you have two tabs open with two different sites.

Now that we know how to open tabs easily, let me give you a scenario where this can be useful: You’re staring at an item list in Action Tracking (or an Amazon.com product search as another example) and you’d like to quickly view several items. Rather than opening one tab, saving and closing it to get back to the list, opening another, saving and closing that to get back to the list and so on, you can simply middle click (or CTRL + left mouse click) on the edit pad icons and they’ll all open up in new tabs. This is a great way to view multiple items, especially if you need to cross-reference information. You should be aware that in our product we design it without tabs in mind because most users don’t use them. So if you click save and close in the item, that tab will be taken back to the item list, and you’ll then have two item list tabs opened. However, if you don’t have any changes to make you can simply close the tab, and you won’t have to wait for the item list page to load again before you can start using it because it’s still loaded in the other tab.

Closing tabs is just as easy to do; click the ‘X’ icon at the top right corner or press CTRL + F4. Internet Explorer is prohibitive compared to other web browsers when it comes to closing tabs and you actually have to click on the tab before the ‘X’ will appear.

You can do many other things with multiple tabs like open a blog article you want to read and leave it for a while almost like a to-do list. Tabs can act as magnified views of a list’s items. You can Google a word that you found in an article without leaving that article by opening a new tab and using Google in the new tab. There are so many ways you can make tabs work for you. Try out some of the shortcuts I’ve shown you to open and close them and see what works best for you. By using the shortcuts provided and the concept of tabs, you can do wonders inside your browser. Hope that helps!

- Aaron Lefkowitz, Application Developer