According to a patent filed by Microsoft on the 22nd of September last year, the little known Quick Tabs feature in Internet Explorer is expected to get more functionality and better tab management options.

Quick Tab as of now displays thumbnails of all tabs open and a close button for each tab.

The patent images reveal that significant improvements will be made to the Quick Tabs interface. Some of the expected enhancements are:

- Drag and move the tabs within the Quick Tabs interface.
- Tab thumbnails would enlarge on mouse-hover.
- In case your tab row was over flowing with tabs and in Quick Tabs you were to hover the mouse on a tab not currently visible on the tab bar, the overflow icons would change appearance.

“The techniques and mechanisms described herein are directed to a method for managing and selecting one out of large set of open tabs in a tabbed browser. Browsing software is configured to provide a quick pick user-interface that visually displays the content of the several tabs, such as a by displaying a thumbnail for each tab.

The thumbnails allow a user to easily distinguish between each opened tab. The browsing software may also be configured to recognize a user selection from within the quick pick user-interface and in response, switch back to a tabbed window view and display the selected tab in that view. The browsing software may adjust the tab row so that the selected tab is positioned in a favorable position within the tab row. In addition, within the quick pick user-interface, the user may reposition the thumbnails and/or close the thumbnails, thus affecting the associated tab in the tab row.”

Thanks BeingManan | Visit US Patent Page.

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