Finally ! Tabs in IE

the one thing that Firefox and Safari could really claim as a killer feature over IE has now gone away. IE has added tabs (okay, while there have been third-party add-ons, these are from Microsoft and they are free)

While it's a free add-on, it's not however with a little baggage.. although good, the implementation does have a few missing features at the moment (maybe we'll have to wait for IE7 for that) and it comes bundled with MS Search - something I've avoided (like Google Desktop Search) while I wait for the search wars to stablise and products to mature (I know where I put things most of the time !) - but I'll give it a go.

So, the flaws;

It's greedy it is on screen real-estate... as well as the big NineMSN butterfly logo, I want to put the toolbar on the same level as the back/foward/home buttons but as soon as I lock the toolbars it moves down to a line of it's own. Would like to see it better integrated into the browser chromoe.

Tabs don't have an individual 'close' button on them (really annoying, means an extra right-click !) - Safari and Firefox manage this, as does Maxthon

Theres no option to make it obsessive with tabs - What I want is new requests for a browser window open as a tab in the same instance... I specifically don't want 5 IEs running, I want one with 5 tabs. Sadly Instances still open as they used to, and there's no way to combine them.

Also, I'm not sure if it's the pop-up blocker or something else, but scriptlets like Bloggers BlogThis don't seem to be working right any more. The pop-up blocker doesn't seem to integrate very well with WinXPsp2 - there are some duplications with both the toolbar and then the IE native blocker trying to be helpful (in reality often just getting in the way - If I tell one pop-up blocker I trust the site, I'd expect it to share that information)

On the whole though it's a great step in the right direction.... here's hoping there's a v2 pretty soon, or IE7 surfaces with all this, and more !