For some reason I can't search in this forum for any posts containing the word 'url' or '/url'.

I realize that /url and $url depend on information that the OS tells to mIRC, and sometimes they lie to mIRC. I'd just like to point out that:

In XP under prior mIRC versions, when I had 2 I.E. browser windows open, that $url would change to be whichever one I last clicked open. In Vista under mIRC 6.32, which has tabs within a browser window, $url will change to the tab I last clicked on within that browser window, but it doesn't seem to want to switch to looking at the 2nd browser window, even when I manually open a website in a new or existing tab of that 2nd browser window.

Also, 6.32 in Vista opens a new tab in an existing browser window, regardless whether I do

/url -n http://www.yahoo.com
or
/url -a http://www.yahoo.com

If this is something that needs fixing for future mIRC's, perhaps there can be a new switch to indicate whether to open in a new tab Ctrl-T instead of a new browser window Ctrl-N.

It looks like IE7 and other tabbed browsers handle the protocol for opening a URL differently than previous browsers. This affects both /url and $url. I haven't been able to find any documentation on how an application might be able to control them more finely. I know that in the IE7 Internet Options/Tabs Settings dialog there are options that determine how IE7 handles requests from other applications - it just might be that it is no longer possible to control the window opening more precisely with tabbed browsers. There could be other limiting factors as well, such as Vista's protected mode behaviour.

As a partial solution, it turns out that IE7 seems to mostly behave the old way by changing the setting in internet-options/general/tabs for "open links from other program in" to be "the current tab or window"

After making this change, $url now follows the active tab when there's 1 instance of IE7 open, and /url -an http://www.yahoo.com now opens a 2nd browser window instead of adding a new tab into the current browser. However, $url still doesn't want to move away from the newest browser window opened.

As I said before, it would also be nice to add a switch so mIRC will open an extra tab in the existing browser window, as well as being able to open a brand new browser window or open the webpage in current tab.