We all know that the modern web browsers support tab browsing. FireFox, IE7, Opera and Safari on Mac (haven’t try it yet) all have their own ways to tab browsing web pages. I bet there are people doing what I am doing. It’s amazing what kind of fun that tab browsing can bring you. It’s also dangerous that tab browsing can damage your profitable web site with just one clicks. So I warn your first.

In FireFox browser, you can open multiple web pages or web sites in one window. It creates many small tabs for each web pages. In theory, you can have unlimited tabs open in one windows. So you can tab through each one and view the content one by one. It’s very useful and very convenient when you have many web pages open the same time.

This is how tab browsing look like in my firefox browser. You can switch view between tabs.

So what is the fun part to user tab browsing. In FireFox, you can save many web pages into one folder under your bookmark. For example, I have store many frequently visited forum URLs in my “Forum” folder. And I save it to my FireFox “Bookmark Toolbar folder”. So I can very easily access them.

So it looks like this in my FireFox browser.

As you can see, I click on Forum folder to get a list of my favorite forums. I have an option “Open All in Tabs” list at the bottom. With just one click, it will open all URLs in the folder (it will not not open URL in subfolder, if there is any) into tabs in one browser window. It will look just like the first picture.

This doesn’t sound fun at all. So what is the fun and useful parts of tab browsing? Let’s say that you don’t want to subscribe your favorite blog RSS feed with any RSS reader. You just want to read one post at time without navigate through the whole list. You simply subscribe the RSS feed in your FireFox live bookmark.

For example, I subscribe my own RSS feed. So I have about 10 posts under my Feed.

With one click, it opens all 10 posts as single page into tabs in the same windows. So I close each one of them after I finished reading. This is one of the daily tasks I do to read all my favorite blogs.

Here is other example of tab browsing fun. I opened my never down RSS feed on Blogger.com. It is opening about 25 posts.

You must be screaming that “Terence Chang is crazy”. Yes. I have to admit that. So why is that fun? First of all, you might just crash someone’s web site because too many page requests in a very short period of time. It will crash slow server with poor MySQL connection. I have test this against my web site hosted on ANHosting.com n times in a row. Luckily, my site is still alive. Hey. Don’t try this against my site. It’s no fun to me.

So what else is fun by doing tab browsing. Have you signup MyBlogLog.com or StumbleUpon.com? Are you tired of visiting every single one of them one by one? If you look closely to one of my screen-shots above. You will see that I have a bookmark folder called “PR4 – MyBlogLog ….” I bookmark many of my favorite friends who have PR4 on their MyBlogLog member page. Keep quiet. It’s a secret. Don’t tell! I one click tab browsing them. So they will see who was recently viewing their member page. So they return a favor and visit my member page.

Same thing to their web sites. I bookmark them. I one click tab browsing them and people will see my face on their MyBlogLog reader list widget. Isn’t that fun? Remember, I only bookmark those pages I really like to read. I believe reading their blog on their web page will bring them more traffic. I don’t want to drive traffic to those pages full of spyware cookies.

Further more, if you have Alexa toolbar installed. You are doing a huge favor to those Alexa traffic ranking believers.

So. Why is tab browsing so dangerous? Do you make profit by running AdSense or other advertisement on your web site? So if you are viewing your own web site RSS feed like I did, you are hurting your own web site. Google, for example, will receive a lot of AdSense requests from the same IP (Owner’s IP) in a very short period time. It will think your are cheating or using software manipulate human browsing. Goolge will either lower your pay-per-click price (not sure how) or even ban your forever. So listen to me!

Don’t try this on your profitable web site with Google AdSense or other impression based ad running.

Enjoy your tab browsing fun and make some profit. Any other thoughts on tab browsing? I would like to hear you feedbacks!