Most of the time you spend in Umbraco's back-end, you will switch constantly between the different sections; Content, Media, Settings, Developer - maybe even the "Member" and "Stats" sections.
I personally find it really annoying to constantly have to re-expand the different menu-trees to get my work done.
Tabbed Browsing to the rescue
The solution to this annoyance was to simply open the Umbraco Back-end by going to straight to the URL [Your Server]/umbraco/umbraco.aspx, that is the page that is opened in the regular pop-up window.
Then copy / paste that URL into as many tabs as you want to work with.
If you open different sections in each tab, all you'll need to do to switch section is to select the containing tab and voilà! Your just in the same spot you left ; ).
A final fix to remove the last annoyance
As you can see in the picture above, all tabs are labeled "umbraco", normally that isn't a problem, but with this Tabbed Browsing way of working I found that I constantly opened the wrong tab, losing some seconds each time. Therefore I made a (very) small tweak in one of Umbraco's javascript files that changes the page title when you switch section.
Update: From Umbraco version 3 this little javascript tweak is already included in the Umbraco installation packages.
The fix is to modify the javascript file "[Your Site Root]\umbraco\js\umbracoDefault.js" somewhere near line number 340 you'll find the javascript function "shiftApp()", add the following line to this function:
top.document.title = appName + " - Umbraco CMS";
Now, the function will look like this:
And if you reload all your tabs and re-select your wanted sections your browser will look like this:
Happy site building out there!
PS. Did you know that you can switch tabs by hitting Ctrl + Tab number, ie Ctrl + 2 to open the settings section in the picture above ; )