Whether you're trying to keep track of a zillion tabs, navigate your bookmarks, or deal with a page that just won't load, the more you use your Web browser, the more likely you are to run into problems. But with the help of hidden features and third-party add-ons, you can tackle these troubles and squeeze even more efficiency out of Apple's Safari 3 and Mozilla's Firefox 2 and 3.

Keep Tabs on Your Tabs
Safari's and Firefox's tabbed browsing features let you open multiple sites within a single window, thereby reducing screen clutter. But some aspects of tabbed browsing are less obvious.
Open Tabs in the Background Say you've just performed a Google search. You now have a results page, which probably includes tons of links you'd like to visit. You could simply click on a link to view that page in the current window, and then click on the Back button or the SnapBack icon in the Search field to return to the results. But an easier way is to Command-click on each link (in Safari or Firefox), which opens pages in new background tabs. You can continue navigating your search results in the foreground. (If the shortcut doesn't work in Safari, go to Safari: Preferences, click on Tabs, and select Command-Click Opens A Link In A New Tab.)

Restore Tabs Automatically After hours of browsing, you often end up with several open windows, each with its own set of carefully culled tabs. Murphy's Law dictates that this is the moment your browser will crash. But you don't need to find all those pages again manually. In Firefox, choose Firefox: Preferences and click on Main; from the When Firefox Starts pop-up menu, choose Show My Windows And Tabs From Last Time. From now on, Firefox will keep track of all open tabs and windows, and restore them automatically when the browser restarts. (When restarting Firefox after a crash, click on the Restore Session button.)

Although Safari doesn't have an auto-restore feature, you can manually regain sites by selecting History: Reopen All Windows From Last Session. To restore sessions automatically, try Hetima Computer's free SafariStand 3. Once you've installed it, choose Stand: SafariStand Setting. Under General, from the Restore Method At Launch pop-up menu, select Automatically Reopen Last Session (Safari). Note that the software uses an unofficial method to alter Safari's behavior. It could stop working after an update to Safari or OS X.

Find Pages
How many times have you read something on the Web and later had no idea where to find that information again? Although browsers keep track of your history--a list of URLs you've visited recently--that isn't much help if you don't know the name of the site or if the page is no longer in the history list. There are several ways to solve this problem.

Use a Search Tool If you're running Mac OS X

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