After downloading and installing the MSN search toolbar, you'll notice that the first time you load up Internet Explorer that your home page appears in a window headed with a tab. Some screen real estate is taken up but on a good-sized monitor the extra features that are available make up for that.

Starting on the left of the bottom row of the toolbar is your My Tabs button (let your mouse hover over the buttons for a few seconds if you're not sure where to find it). You can use My Tabs in different ways but one method is to open a new tab (the blue plus sign) for each site you visit when you go online. Of course, these sites could come from your favorites (sic). After you've opened these sites, click the arrow alongside the My Tabs button and choose "Set current pages as My Tabs". From now on when you open Internet Explorer you can click My Tabs and each site you've chosen will load into its own window and the tab will tell you the name of the site so you can easily move from one to the other. A tip for dialup users: don't put too many sites into your My Tabs otherwise you'll be waiting for ages for them to appear.

You have to be a bit careful not to click the red X button in your Internet Explorer window until you've become used to tabbed browsing - you'll close all your sites if you click the Exit button out of habit! However you can recover from this by opening IE again then click the arrow alongside My Tabs and choose "Open Last Viewed Tabs" from the drop down list of options.

One shortcoming of tabbed browsing, whether it be in IE with the MSN search toolbar or other browsers, is what happens when you click a link to a site that opens in a new browser window (e.g., clicking a link to a site from the webDotDirectory always opens a new window). In one browser, there's nothing to tell you a new window has opened, while in another, a new tab is created but you're still at the page on which you clicked. The default setting for the MSN search toolbar version of tabbed browsing is to open the new window in a new instance of Internet Explorer. You can change this behaviour by clicking the second button on the left, "Open each link in a new background tab".

An easy way to learn more about tabbed browsing is to open a new tab and use the link to "Learn more about tabbed browsing" at the MSN search toolbar help site.

The Internet never stands still and webDotWiz just managed to include the link to the MSN search toolbar built specifically for Australia in his previous column. So here are some differences between the U.S. version and our locoal version.

If you installed the first version of MSN search toolbar, that is the U.S. version, you'll be prompted to download the Australian version (if Australia is your home country). However there are a couple of features not included in the Australian version.

One feature not available, as yet anyway, is to search for an address and locate it on a map. Another is not having the choice to immediately obtain sports scores.

To locate an address on a map you'll need to sepately use the MSN Maps and Directions site and choose Australia from the dropdown list of countries and regions for which maps are available (webDotWiz hasn't had time to check which towns and cities are mapped but Shepparton is there if that's any help).