Tabs, bookmarks, and finding your way back
Keep several pages open without losing any of them, and be able to return to anything you have looked at.
A tab is one page, held open. The strip along the top of the browser is the row of tabs, and you can have as many as you like — one for the recipe, one for the news, one for the thing you meant to buy. This has nothing to do with the Tab key on the keyboard; the two happen to share a word, and that is all.
Closing a tab closes that page and nothing else. It deletes nothing, cancels nothing and loses nothing. Your other tabs carry on entirely undisturbed.
A bookmark — some browsers call them favorites — is a note of where a page lives, kept by you. Press the star at the end of the address bar and the page is saved. Press it again to remove it.
Key points
- Tabs hold several pages at once; closing one loses nothing
- Ctrl+Shift+T brings back the tab you closed by mistake
- Bookmarks are your own front doors — and the safest way to reach your bank
- History remembers where you have been; private browsing only stops it writing it down
What to remember
- The star keeps a page. The menu brings back the one you closed. Neither of them can lose anything.
- Closing a tab is not deleting. Almost nothing in a browser is.
- Three lists, three purposes. Between them, nothing you have seen on the web is ever truly lost.
- It is a curtain on your own window. It is not a cloak, and it was never sold as one — but the name does it no favours.
Try this
Bookmark the three websites you use most. Put them in a folder called Mine. Next time you open the browser they will be one press away, and you will never mistype one of them again.
Practice: Tabs, bookmarks, and finding your way back. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.