Moving More Easily Between Two or More Webpages Open at the Same time
If you have experienced difficulty getting bank or retail customer websites to display reports when you're signed in, sometimes your "tab settings" can make a difference.
Most computer users pay little attention to tab settings, but knowing something about them can help prevent difficulties in using financial and other customer- or member- websites.
Tabs are separate displays that get opened and are available simultaneously during a single web browser session.
If you have multiple tab displays open, you'll see them identified by title in a horizontal row in the top area of your browser program.
More often than not, the titles are short, abbreviated, not always helpful. (Some browsers will display a thumbnail preview of the full page display when you hover your cursor overtop a tab label.)
Generally it's best to keep down the number of open tabs to a half dozen or so - at least limited to what will fit on a screen visibly from left to right.
Here's the main problem with having too many tabs open - they all take up memory, and your operating system allocates only a certain amount of memory to the browser.
If you're using a sign-in website such as for banking, medical, shopping or online study for example, those websites tend to have a lot of reports that are programmed to open in "new tabs". As a result, it's easy to have an excessive number of tabs open, which may cause the browser to bog down for lack of memory.
This results in getting blank pages with endlessly spinning wheels that only slowly, or never display the information desired.
There are two primary ways to deal with the "too many tabs" problem.
One is to tweek your tab preferences in the browser settings area so that fewer pages open up in "new" tabs. The location and steps for doing this vary a lot from one browser version to another, so this may be an area to ask for help.
The other way to abate the "too many tabs" problem is to close out extra tabs as you open new ones.
This is something than any computer user can do with ease. You can close a tab by clicking the "X" in the title label for that tab up at the top.
Often the "extra" tabs are duplicates anyway, displaying the same page or report multiple times if you're using the website to research something actively.
Since business websites often program these report links to open in new tabs automatically, you may be opening the same report in a new tab again and again every time that you revisit that link during a single customer visit.
(An alternative to doing this is to use the spiral-arrow reload icon, if you're familiar with that.)
The main thing is to keep an eye on how many tabs accumulate running left-to-right at the head of your browser, and close those which look like duplicates before you lose track of what's open.
This simple practice can help prevent frustrating moments when the browser simply becomes exceedingly slow or unresponsive for lack of available memory.
This discussion applies to any browser program to some extent, but especially to Internet Explorer, which no longer gets Microsoft support for a lot of new and demanding code and scripts. Most business and account-oriented websites seem to recommend Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as the preferred browser. However, if you're using a new Windows 10 machine you'll need to download and install one of these; the default on those machines otherwise is Microsoft Edge. If you're using a Mac, you'll probably be using Safari. Regardless of which, the discussion above generally applies to all.
|
|
