When your browser is your desktop, your tab bar becomes your most trusted ally. Each tab is used for a specific application, and you move from application to application by simply switching tabs. Problem is, tabs are usually created from bookmarks, which means that you need to import your bookmarks every time you move to a new computer.

Now that Microsoft Internet Explorer supports tabs, tab browsing has become available with most web browsers. One convenient way to load your Office 2.0 setup is to create a bookmark for each application, group bookmarks into one or more folders, turn the bookmark bar on, and click on “Open in Tabs” to load all your applications at once. This gives you what I call “Single Click Setup Loading”. The question then becomes: how could I get this on any computer?

Of course, one could download a bookmark file from the Internet and upload it into the web browser provided by the new computer. But if you’re using someone else’s computer, the owner might not like the idea of letting you mess with neatly-organized bookmarks. Furthermore, you would also have to make sure that you remove your bookmarks when your session expired, either for courtesy reasons or privacy concerns. Not the best way to enhance your productivity…

A better option would be to go to your personal homepage and click on a link that would automatically create multiple tabs, one for each application. As far as I can tell, JavaScript should be able to achieve such a trick. And in a perfect world, the list of Office 2.0 applications that make your setup would be fetched by your homepage from some social bookmarking service such as del.icio.us.

If you know how to do this, let me know, for I’d love to try it.