Weekly Computer Tip # 339
6 May 2011


Different ways to close your browser tabs
(Internet Explorer 7 and beyond)

First of all apologies for skipping a week (glad some of you noticed) but given April's celebration galore I felt there was no point to send a tip last week as most of you were either in front of the telly or - more likely - took the three days holiday to get 11 days off. But even though I probably will still get lots of "out of office" messages as soon as I click on Send, I'm back...

With the release of Internet Explorer (IE) 7 we all had to get used to "tabbed browsing", which means you can have multiple websites open in a single browser window. Although this results in fewer items open on the taskbar I know that there are some neat and tidy people out there that want to close tabs as they go along.

Here's how:

  1. Press CTRL+W. OR
  2. Click the X on the tab. OR
  3. Click the tab you want to close with the middle mouse button. OR
  4. Right-click on the tab and select Close.

Try them out and find the one you like best!

By the way, if you hate tabbed browsing, you can turn it off.

Here's how:

  1. Select the Tools menu, followed by Internet Options.
  2. On the General tab, in the Tabs section, click Settings.
  3. Untick the Enable Tabbed Browsing check box.
  4. Click OK twice.
  5. Close and open Internet Explorer.

From now on every webpage will open in a new Internet Explorer window, like it used to do many, many moons ago.

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