tab

The keyboard key I like most. It's many uses include:

1. Indenting paragraphs
2. Lining up text
3. otherwise moving the cursor left in a controlled, orderly fashion
4. Moving to the next field on a form
5. Switching weapons in Unreal Tournament (provided you have configured your keys in a superior fashion)

It also plays a significan role, along with Alt, in switching programs in Microsoft Windows.

Tab rocks my world. Don't event get me started on Ctrl Tab.

A term for cigarette used in the north of England (according to Swanky G).

They used to talk about them all the time in YS.

Usually short for guitar tablature. It's a score sheet composed of numbers for the guitar. Quite different from the usual black dots on piano sheets. People commonly go searching on Altavista, Yahoo with the string "song title" + "TAB" because people don't usually use the whole word tablature in their webpages.

A further contraction of Cantab., used a derisive term for graduate of Cambridge University by those at Oxford. Used to full inflamatory effect in the chant "You're a tab and you know you are" uttered at the University Boat Race.

The world's second one-calorie soft drink, a competitor to Diet Rite, produced by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Tab became a hit among dieters, although not everyone liked the aftertaste from the artificial sweetener (cyclamate) used. The drink's popularity further waned upon news that cyclamate was possibly carcinogenic, at least in lab rats. Tab is still sold, with the same health warning seen on packets of Sweet'N Low, in very limited quantities. Most diet drinks now use Aspartame, but Ace-K has already won over the hearts of many.

Update 12/24/03 RoyHoo33 says i just picked up some tab, and it's now made with aspartame, but it still has the same shitty aftertaste

Update 01/18/05 sighmoan notes that the artificial sweetener used was cyclamate, not saccharine. Cyclamate was banned in the U.S. in 1969.

Tabs are a feature of modern web browsers that greatly improve browsing efficiency.

Until now, one window on the taskbar has been thought of as one web page. With tabs, each window can be thought of as many pages, one behind the other.

Instead of opening a new window for each new page, you can open a new window for each topic, and then use each window to keep tabs relating to that one topic. So instead of having 50 mozilla windows open, I now have 3 - a news window, which has 10 tabs in it, an e2 browsing window which has 20, and one for the node I'm working on, which has 20. They only take up three spaces on the taskbar. Near the top of each window, underneath the navigation buttons, there is a row of tabs, which functions exactly like a taskbar.

Tabs are good because:

• They make it easy to find the page you want when you have 50+ pages open at the same time. Tabs are easier to group by topic than windows are.
• When you close a tab, where you go is predictable and related to what you are doing - you are still in the same window, so you can continue as normal, dealing with the same topic. In contrast, when you close a window, Windows kicks you into the last application you used, which is often unrelated to what you are doing.
• They reduce clutter in the taskbar. I used to have ~50 mozilla windows open all the time, most of them e2. Now I have only 2 or 3 mozilla windows, each of which contains many pages, split into categories.
• Window focus is not stolen when you open a new page: when you open something in a new window, you have to do some work to get back to where you were before. That's annoying if you want to open many pages. With tabs opening in the background, you don't lose focus, so it's nice. This is also useful for opening a link many times to move it to the top of the list of softlinks.

Here is how tabs work: instead of constantly opening new windows, just set mozilla to "open tabs in background of current window" and then open everything you want into new tabs in the background, while continuing to read the current page. It's the same as browsing by opening everything in a new window, except if you judiciously open new windows for new topics, you can keep everything seperated and easier to find, and also not have your window focus stolen constantly.

When you close a tab, mozilla shows the next tab on the left. That is the only difference between it and the windows taskbar.

The bad things about using tabs:

• You can lose a lot of open windows accidentally; if you kill a window that has 50 open tabs in it, they're all lost, and that's annoying. At first I did this quite often, since I have been so used to quickly closing and opening many new windows all the time.
• If a page is in a background tab and you are in another application, you can't go directly to that page - you have to first go to that window through the taskbar, and then click on that tab. This is a loss from when everything was kept on the taskbar. However, it isn't so bad.

So in general, finding out about tabs has really improved the way I browse, and I am really happy I started using them.

* if you are wondering why I use more than one window at all to browse: many people now open links in new windows, and then go back to the page they were reading before. While they are reading it, the other page has time to load. In this way, you never have to wait for something to load. The above is a more sophisticated way of opening lots of things in new windows.

Tab (?), n. [Etymol. uncertain.]

1.

The flap or latchet of a shoe fastened with a string or a buckle.

2.

A tag. See Tag, 2.

3.

A loop for pulling or lifting something.

4.

A border of lace or other material, worn on the inner front edge of ladies' bonnets.

5.

A loose pendent part of a lady's garment; esp., one of a series of pendent squares forming an edge or border.

 

© Webster 1913