I thought I would post this here because it’s not easy to figure out. If you use a web browser like Opera, you know how cool and useful the “duplicate tab” feature is for web browsing… However, a quick glance at your “tab features” in IE7 and Firefox might leave you with the thought that you can’t duplicate or clone an existing tab into a new one that contains the same URL. You can.
The following procedure allows you to duplicate an existing TAB from within Firefox or IE7.
*Step 1.
Go to a tab that has the site that you want to duplicate.
*Step 2.
Click on the ADDRESS URL bar of that tab (URL will become highlighted)
*Step 3.
While all the words are highlighted in the ADDRESS BAR, perform the following key combination: hold ALT and press ENTER, i.e. ALT+ENTER. Voila! New tab that has the same URL as the one you wanted to clone.
That is all you should need to do to replicate the tab. So, if you had trouble replicating, duplicating, copying, mirroring, doubling, repeating or just plain cloning the TAB in IE7, or Firefox, now you know how to do it!
I would assume that in the next upgrade of both of these browsers they will add this rather OBVIOUS feature to the right-click functionality of the TAB itself. It’s a no-brainer… but you know what happens when you assume!
Cheers,
J. Pisano
Note: Although the tab with the original URL is duplicated, the history is not “duplicated” as it is with Opera. :(
UPDATE: You can find a plugin to help with this for FireFox from Twanno at:
http://twanno.mozdev.org/
This is not quite the point… if I wanted to use an additional 3 steps to duplicate a tab, then this method works great. What I think most people are talking about is that handy add-in that Firefox has that allows you to simply right click and duplicate a tab (with all its history) to a new tab. IE7 does not have that as far as i can tell.
Anonymous,
Agreed! This is why I closed with the comment “I would assume that in the next upgrade of both of these browsers they will add this rather OBVIOUS feature to the right-click functionality of the TAB itself. It’s a no-brainer… but you know what happens when you assume!”
There is Absolutely NO reason that IE7 should not have this functionality easily integregated into the tab feature by right clicking. I use all the the “big” browsers to check for compatibility of this site. Because I like the advanced features of the OWA web access provided by IE (Big issues with this and IE7 -search here for more info), I use IE most often.
The Alt-Enter is not the “best solution”, it’s a workaround at best, but it is handy, because without it, I can’t duplicate the tab in IE7. It’s the reason I posted this article, it’s hard to find information about this topic.
And your right, unfortunately the “browser history” is not duplicated…this is a big let down. I hope Microsoft gets their act together on the next release of this…
Thanks!
J. Pisano
Thanks. A useful workaround I hadn’t thought of, even if it’s not quite what I (or you or most) are looking for.