So I found this awesome program called QTTabBar, and it adds tabs to Windows Explorer. If you’re like me, you use tabbed browsing a lot. So when you have to go from that to clunky ‘ole Explorer, it kind of sucks switching between more than three windows. So, make it easier on yourself and put all open explorer windows into tabs.

The difference this makes is astounding. Tabs are widely accepted as a UI standard, seen not only on the web but also in Windows dialog boxes. Hell, they’ve been around since the days of Windows 2000, right? Almost every “Properties” dialog is organized by tabs. Even though they are gray and ugly, even in Windows 7, not once have I ever thought to myself, “man, this Properties dialog is clunky.” In fact, I think they’re even easier to understand and navigate than other newer Windows features, like the Control Panel or configuring a Library.

So tabs are not a scary new UI structure for Windows, yet somehow they haven’t made their way into Windows Explorer. Let’s see, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s first browser to have tabs, was released in March 2009, with Windows 7 following in October that same year. Even though Firefox had tabs for a long, long time before then, it seems that Microsoft didn’t get the message that the masses were expecting tabbed interfaces until their development on IE8. How did they miss the boat for Windows Explorer in Windows 7?

To get just a straight-up bar of tabs without any other clutter, you have to mess around quite a bit with QTTabBar’s extensive menu of options. Additionally, you have to right-click on the left side of the toolbars, on the bumpy ridge handle thing, in Windows Explorer and uncheck everything but QTTabBar itself. I found this is the cleanest implementation.

Hope this helps.