Firefox has had tabs for donkeys years, Opera has too, now MS are jumping on the bandwagon and hoping to market it as an &quot;innovation&quot; on their part. No surprise there. But out of these three &quot;next gen&quot; browsers (FF2, Opera 9, IE7) it really suprised me to notice that as far as usability is concerned Opera 9 and IE7 make it instinctively easy to open a new tab, Firefox 2 however, not so obvious.<br /><br />For easy reference I&#39;ve added some screen shots..<br /><br /><div style=&quot;text-align: center&quot;><img src=&quot;{e_IMAGE}newspost_images/Opera9_clipped.jpg&quot; style=&quot;border: 0px solid black; width: 555px; height: 222px&quot; alt=&quot;Opera9_clipped.jpg&quot; /></div><br /><div style=&quot;text-align: center&quot;><img src=&quot;images/newspost_images/IE7_clipped.jpg&quot; style=&quot;border: 0px solid black; width: 555px; height: 222px&quot; alt=&quot;IE7_clipped.jpg&quot; /></div><br /><br /><div style=&quot;text-align: center&quot;><img src=&quot;images/newspost_images/FF2_clipped.jpg&quot; style=&quot;border: 0px solid black; width: 555px; height: 222px&quot; alt=&quot;FF2_clipped.jpg&quot; /></div><br />The above screenshots are standard, default installs, without any configuration. Yes, I know it&#39;s <em>possible</em> to double-click the tab bar in Firefox to open a new tab (but not when it&#39;s already full), and yes I know it&#39;s <em>possible</em> to customise the toolbar to add a New Tab button like those in IE7 and Opera 9. Or by installing an extension like <a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/158/&quot; rel=&quot;external&quot;>Tabbrowser Preferences</a> or <a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1456/&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;>New Tab Button on Tab Bar</a>, but that&#39;s faffing around and most people are not willing to learn about extensions and go hunting for one to do the job that IE7 and Opera 9 do by <u>default</u>.<br /><br />A lot of newcomers to Firefox will only see the tab bar once... when Firefox launches for the first time after a new install. They see two tabs open and then close the browser without fully realising what tabs mean. If Mozilla and the Firefox devs wants to promote the fact that it pioneered tabbed browsing then I think at the very least a &quot;New Tab&quot; button should be there by default even if it&#39;s on the Navigation bar. As a summary, it&#39;s my opinion that not having this button visible to the user by default only acts as a barrier to entry for Firefox, and one that&#39;s totally avoidable.<br /><br />Some may think I&#39;m nitpicking but I&#39;m a long-term user of Firefox (since the heady days of it being called Firebird) and I really want to see it become more and more usable to newcomers who&#39;ve heard good things about it. I&#39;ve been waiting to see this elusive little button be set to &quot;on&quot; by default ever since Firefox v0.8 was released... it&#39;s frustrating for me to see that it still hasn&#39;t been enabled. *sigh* here&#39;s hoping they enable it by default in Gran Paradiso.<br />