Ironically, I think people on slow connections were early pioneers of using tabs for asynchronous/background page loading. I don't remember where I learned the

Ironically, I think people on slow connections were early pioneers of using tabs for asynchronous/background page loading. I don't remember where I learned the technique first, but when I was roaming the world and getting work done via GPRS internet, I'd open links in a new tab and let them slowly load in the background. I'd view the tab later and see the fully rendered content. It would absolutely kill this use case if the tabs would not perform their necessary AJAX calls until foregrounded. For those not familiar with GPRS of those times, imagine a 9600-14.4 modem speed but with the latency of a satellite connection, so with almost any activity you start seeing 1 second ping times. Even when on ridiculously fast connections, I still retain the muscle memory which causes me to browse in breadth-first mode, opening articles and discussions into tabs in one sweep and then working through the tab list from left to right and closing each as I go.