When Firefox came upon the browser scene eons ago one of the things that set it apart from the others was the supposed introduction of tabs. In fact Maxthon (formerly called MyIE2) introduced the concept well before Firefox but because it was a niche browser popular in Asia Firefox got the glory. In the browser bitch slapping that started between the browser fanatics one of the main lines used was that Firefox made the user more productive because of the tabbed browsing ability.

Of course productivity is important so anything that accomplishes this is worth trying; but to suggest that tabbed browsing makes one more production in nothing short of a fallacy. Sure tabs are cool, tabs are neat and yes they make browsing easier and create less clutter on your desktop but that is about it. Now id browser were to be productive you’d be able to tile your different tabs, you’d be able to select which ones to tile and then independently zoom in each of them. That would be productivity.

Think about it for a second. How is having to tab through the different browser windows making you productive? Cognitively the human mind can compare better when things are side by side. The moment you switch views you are losing the thought processes.

To give you an example – lets say you are working on an article and you have three or four difference reference sites in different browser tabs. First you have to decide which of them is your starting point of reference, then you have to keep switching between the browser tabs to build up the thought pattern and to be able to grab the pieces you want. How is this productive?

Now lets assume you have all three or four reference sites tiled side by side; or some similar setup, and you can flow between them to build up your thought pattern. There is no wasted time having to click on tabs and re-orient yourself each time you change pages.

Look, there is nothing wrong with having cool features but unless they really enhance a person’s productivity don’t be  misleading. Besides if you really want to be productive then do the best thing possible and go multi monitor because I can tell you from experience that a simple thing like running dual monitors will do more for your productivity than anything else and you will never want to go back to using a single monitor. That’s productivity and  you don’t need tabs.