Great news for those who love tabs in the browser: you can now get tabs in Windows explorer as well.
We recently mentioned TabExplorer, a free utility that superimposes tabs onto Windows 7. This time around we feature Clover, another free utility that adds tabs to Windows, and does it very well.
Clover adds tabs to Windows Explorer that look very ‘natural’, like they’re an inherent part of Windows.
It allows you to drag tabs to rearrange them, drag them out of the tabbed interface altogether to into new Windows, and even adds a ‘bookmarks bar’ where you can drag files, folders, and shortcuts to get instant, easy access to them.
I am not going to say much about this one: it works remarkably well. The bookmark bar is removable, if you don’t want it, and tends to be somewhat confusing when you’re trying to get shortcuts on it in the first place (CTRL+D adds the current path, or simply drag and drop objects onto the bookmarks bar, then edit the names so you don’t have the full path taking up space on the toolbar).
The verdict: clover takes up a lightweight 10 megs of memory, which is a definite plus. It provides a better experience than recently mentioned TabExplorer. For most people, gold standard in tabbed explorer extensions is a program called QTTabbar, but here’s the thing: if you just want tabs in Explorer, Clover is probably the best, easiest option, as QTTabbar is an ambitious program that adds many other bells and whistles. I would love to hear what you guys think about this.
[Thanks to reader Sylvain for letting us know about this software]
Visit the Clover English page. You can find the download button is on the main page. (Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7; 32bit and 64bit).
