There's also a great feature that lets you save a group of tabs as a Favorite, and later reopen them in one fell swoop. Why use this? You might, for example, have a group of news sites you like to visit, or sites related to a special interest, such as digital photography or opera. Open the sites, save them as a tab group, then later reopen them all at once.

To do it, click the Add to Favorites button (a green plus sign on top of a yellow star), select "Add Tab Group to Favorites," choose the Favorites folder in which you want to save a group, name the group (for example, "Tech News Sites"), and save it. Open up the group as you would any individual Favorite, and they'll all open in their own tabs.

For basic tabbed browsing, that's a pretty good starting point. But it should be just a starting point, not an end point, and here's where IE7 falls down. For example, there should be some way to re-create a previous browsing session. Let's say Windows or your browser has crashed. Now, Microsoft might not like to admit that this ever happens, but in the world that I live in, it happens all the time. You'd like to reopen IE, and re-create the browser session you had before the crash, with all the sites opened in their own tabs. There's no way to do this in IE7.

In addition, what if you accidentally close a tab, and realize that you didn't mean to close it? Wouldn't it be nice to reopen that tab to the page where you were? You can't do it in IE7.

All these tabbed features, and more, are available in Firefox 1.5 via extensions. And restoring previous browsing sessions after a crash, and reopening accidentally closed browser tabs, are built into Firefox 2.0, now in Release Candidate 3 (RC3) code. But they're not built into IE7, and given that there's not likely to be a flourishing IE7 add-on community any time soon (as I'll explain later in this review), Microsoft would do well to write these kinds of features directly into the browser.