A Study of Tabbed Browsing Among Mozilla Firefox Users

The authors present a study which investigated how and why users of Mozilla Firefox use multiple tabs and windows during web browsing. The detailed web browsing usage of 21 participants was logged over a period of 13 to 21 days each, and was supplemented by qualitative data from diary entries and interviews. Through an examination of several measures of their tab usage, they show that their participants had a strong preference for the use of tabs rather than multiple windows. They report the reasons they cited for using tabs, and the advantages over multiple windows. They identify several common tab usage patterns which browsers could explicitly support.