Tab (GUI)

On computers using graphics for an interface, a tab is a way to switch between different controls (such as in a configuration screen), or documents (such as in a web browser or word processor). Only one tab can be active at a time.

An example of tabs in gedit

Use in browsers

More recently tabs have become a popular feature of most web browsers. This allows you to have more than one website open in the same window.

An example of Mozilla Firefox (version 2) with three tabs open.

Tab (GUI) Media

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  Example of a tabbed interface with two sets of tabs: Horizontal tabs, at the top, allow navigation to different pages within the Wiktionary website. Vertical tabs, to the left, represent languages in which a given spelling occurs, where the selected tab shows the word jam ('already') in Esperanto.

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  HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system

Related pages

• Tabbed Document Interface

Other websites

• Navigation Archived 2009-07-01 at the Wayback Machine and Module Archived 2009-07-01 at the Wayback Machine tabs at the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
• Yahoo! UI Library Archived 2009-07-06 at the Wayback Machine TabView
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
• Scriptaculous AJAX tabs Archived 2008-06-17 at the Wayback Machine