Zecco.com Continues to Impress

As you may well know, I have been using Zecco for a few months now as my trading platform. This Thursday gave me a good chance to put Zecco to the test in a rapidly deteriorating market. All of my trades executed immediately. I was impressed. The website never slowed down, and I was able to complete some effective tax harvesting with ETFs in just a few minutes.

Keep up the good work, Zecco!

How To Disable Tabs in Firefox 2.0

I seem to be one of the few out there that dislikes tabbed browsing in Firefox. In previous versions, I had no problems disabling this feature using the simple GUI in the Tools Menu. However, they seemed to be adamant that all users MUST use tabs in 2.0, regardless of what the checked options said.

I have finally found a fix, and it doesn't require you to install an add-in like TabKiller to disable a "feature."

Here's the details: type "about:config" in your address bar and hit Enter to see the configuration values for Firefox. Besides anything with "Tab" in the name, you are specifically looking for one value called "browser.link.open_external" This is likely set to "3," and needs to be set to either 1 or 2.

1:cur 2:win 3:tab

Also look out for browser.link.open_newwindow and make sure this isn't set to 3.

Why, might you ask, do I not like tabbed browsing? It's all a matter of screen real-estate. I already have a bar that does the exact job of Tabs. IT'S CALLED THE TASKBAR!!! That, combined with ALT+TAB is all I need to surf the web and multitask well. I don't want to give up any more screen real-estate for a redundant feature.

However, I can see a future lawsuit against Microsoft to remove the taskbar from windows because it is making it less competitive for tabbed browsing. Chances are, it will pass in the European Union, too!

I can see only a couple of uses for tabbed browsing, and most are pretty lame.

1. You're just following the trend because this is a new cool thing to do.
2. You routinely run more than 10 programs at the same time AND you have some other program that absolutely will not allow you to resize your taskbar AND you have disabled grouping of taskbar icons in Windows. (Pretty far-fetched to have all three simultaneously).
3. You want to be able to use ALT-TAB to quickly switch back to your real work application in case the boss comes around. If this is the case, GET TO WORK, SLACKER!!! You shouldn't be browsing ebay while @ work anyway.
4. Your screen is entirely too large for the limited amount of work you can do on a computer, and you feel that it is necessary to donate this extra screen space to Firefox. If this is your case, I do accept donations of LCD monitors larger than 21". Please contact me for details on where to send free computer monitors.