Skip to main content

Opera-Like Follower Tab Extension For Chrome Makes Web Surfing Effortless

If you are not familiar with Opera, it’s unlikely that you have ever heard about the follower tab. Even Opera fans doesn’t talk about it much, not that everyone is aware of its existence. It is one of those perks of using Opera – you use the browser for years and it still keeps surprising us with new discoveries.

The follower tab is a feature unique to Opera. You can create a follower tab by right-clicking on a current tab in the tab-bar and then clicking Create Follower Tab. The follower tab will be initially blank, but now any link you click on in the original tab will no longer open in that tab. Instead it will open in the follower tab.

That might not sound like a very useful thing since you can easily open links in a new tab. But one Reddit user showed how we can cleverly uses this feature to effortlessly browse the social media site. In fact, this method can be applied to browse any site with tons of links to click on such as Twitter, Facebook, forums and even blogs.

Say, you have a page with many links that you want to checkout. We will use Reddit as an example. Instead of opening a new tab for every link and cluttering the browser, we will use the follower tab.

First open Reddit in a new browser Window. Right-click on the tab in the tab-bar and click Create Follower Tab. This will create an empty new tab.

opera-follower-tab

Right click on the tab-bar again and choose Arrange > Tile Vertically.

opera-follower-tab-arrange

This will split the browser window in half, with the ‘Master’ tab – the one with Reddit open – on the left half of the screen and the follower tab on the right. Now click any link on the Reddit homepage and it will open in the follower tab on the right. This way you can checkout every story on Reddit without having to constantly switch between multiple tabs. See how intuitive that is?

opera-follower-tab2

The follower tab feature is now available in Chrome, but to make it behave like Opera the steps involved are different.

After you install the extension, open the website you want to browse (Reddit, in our example) in a new Window. Right-click on the page (not on the tab-bar) and click ‘Create follower tab’. Just like in Opera, a blank follower tab will open.

chrome-follower-tab

Press the Windows key in your keyboard and then press the Left arrow key, to snap the Chrome window to the left half of the screen. This is the Aero Snap feature of Windows 7.

Now drag the follower tab out of the window and drop it into the desktop to create a new Chrome window. Snap the follower tab window to the right half of the screen by pressing the Windows key and the Right Arrow key together. You are now set.

chrome-follower-tab2

Have fun browsing your favorite social media/news site or discussion forum.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: