Internet Explorer 7.0 will have tabs. That’s great. I hope it will possible to open tabs as well as normal pop-up window’s. This is how I want it to work in 24SevenOffice:
1. Application opens in new window.
2. Pop-up window’s shall open in new windows. This can be ‘search for customer’ or ‘add new task form’.
3. User shall be able to ‘alt + right-click’ (or some other way) to open a link in the menu to a new tab. This way I can have the various menu modules in their own tab’s.
We have a very broad range of modules in our application and power users get a very cluttered taskbar when they have several modules open simultaneously. I want a solution to that (tabs) but at the same time use normal pop-up windows. I am aware of that we have special needs as this is a web-application and thus behave quite differently to normal web sites.
Regarding IE7, hopefully they will fix all the CSS bugs as well - which is much more important than tabs. Third-party tools can implement tabs in IE, there are several solutions for that. But CSS bugs and standard implementation can only be fixed by MS. I hope they focus on this and not just simple new features.
Read more at the IEBlog : IE7 Has Tabs