PolyBrowser offers tab-free web browsing

Tabbed interfaces are the design of choice for just about any application which needs to open multiple documents simultaneously, and it’s easy to see why: they’re simple, straightforward, easy to manage and use.

PolyBrowser is a Firefox-based web browser which does things a little differently, ditching the tabs in favor of "panoramic navigation". Instead of hosting browsing sessions in isolated tabs, PolyBrowser stitches them together, side by side. You can scroll freely from one page to another by dragging the horizontal scrollbar, or right-clicking and dragging horizontally with the mouse.

If the default page size doesn’t work for you, then you can drag handles to resize them, and so fit more pages on the screen at one time. Or you might right-click and drag vertically to zoom in and out, making it easier to browse even the longest of web pages.

You don’t have to give up tab buttons entirely. They’re still presented by default to the left of PolyBrowser’s toolbar, and you can select, right-click and otherwise manage them just as in regular Firefox.

You don’t have to do without your regular add-ons, either: there are thousands compatible with the browser.

Small extras include a left-hand search pane which supposedly helps you save space, though as it’s just a single Google custom search box, and nothing else, it doesn’t look too efficient to us.

If you like PolyBrowser’s approach, it’s also possible to save your current tabs to the cloud as a PolyMark, then open them on some other system later.

Will "panoramic browsing" revolutionize your online experience? Probably not. PolyBrowser’s approach can work well in some situations, though, and if you’d like to try it out then the program can run alongside an existing Firefox installation without conflict.

PolyBrowser is a freeware web browser available for Windows Vista and later, Mac and Linux.