Tabbed browsing (which has been around in Mozilla for ages) is soooo nice. Recently a co-worker showed me how to create tabbed shell windows on Linux (ctrl-alt-N for a new shell in the same window, then ctrl-alt-S to give it a name) and my desktop got even more decluttered. Er, less cluttered.

There's an extension to smooth out the jerky scrolling. It allows you to select how much scroll it scrolls per click of the mousewheel while you turn it, and also if you hold down alt-it scrolls very fast.

Check out Extensions.

I use about 25-30 of them. There are some VERY handy ones.

I've been using Firefox since Google News said 1.0 was available. Love it? It's a browser, get real! It works. It blocks popups. It shows me what I want to see and blocks most (nothing is perfect) of what I don't want. As a bouns: It isn't Microsoft! Who could ask for anything more?

You're forgetting something. Firefox functions much more efficiently when you think in Russian.

You're still running MT 2.6something?

The buttons work with Firefox in MT 3.1. There's also a little patch around somewhere that makes them work in MT 2.6.

Dowload the tabbed browser extensions and then you can tweak how they work from the options menu. Also there is an extension called called autocopy which is pretty nifty. It automatically copies text highlighted in the browser window so you don't have to ctrl-C or right click, copy.

Yeah, he's still running MT 2.6 something. There's only so many hours in the day, you know, and he's not nearly as, er, noisy as some of my other clients. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, dontcha know. :)

If you keep using IE, have a look at www.avantbrowser.com -- it adds tabs, buttons for Flash blocking, pop up control, per-site cookie control, et cetera.

Avant is a wrapper for IE, not a new browser, so you don't lose the compatibility you do with Firefox.

You can turn tabbed browsing off, if you don't like it (I did). See Tools:Options:Advanced, which also allows you to tweak the scrolling.

What makes Firefox really special are the extensions. AdBlock is terrific; SpellBound, GoogleBar, and ForecastFox are all worthwhile, too.

I've been using Avantbrowser for a while now (take a look at my archives). I'll have to say I'm in favor of it. The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't have as much of the drag'n'drop functionality with the address bar that IE has (In IE, I can drag the icon from the address bar into my favorites task pane and it will stay there, in the place I select.) Also, I order my bookmarks idiosyncratically, and it has a nasty habit of losing the favorites ordering.

Has a GREAT pop-up eater, as well. And the capability of remembering the tabs I had open and re-opening them is pretty cool as well

Yay Firefox! You'll be amazed as how quickly you get used to tabbed browsing. It irritated me at first too.

Ditto the others about going through all the settings. You can change a LOT of stuff about firefox, so take some time to go through all the options, 1 by 1.

Having said that, yes, it's quirky, but I'll take quirky over shite anyday.

I use Firefox all of the time without ever using tabbed browsing, and I haven't modified the default settings.

That's because I always right-click on links and select "Open in New Window". (I was already used to doing this with IE, so no big deal for me.)

Thus, my task bar is cluttered with four different Firefox windows at present.

I semi-regularly use Firefox on OSX, and it drives me to screaming rage every time.

Why? Because the Firefox team, in their infinite wisdom, decided that text-selection behaviour in their product needed to work their way, rather than the way it works in every other piece of software in the system.

Also, slow. But I should partially blame my hardware for that, I think. YMMV, but I still personally vastly prefer IE on XP or Win2k to every other browsing evnironment I've ever tried (and that's been a lot of them).

When the wife moved in last year and we hooked her Dell into my broadband network, that computer effectively exploded. Hibernating spyware, malware, you name it, came out of the digital woodwork; within a couple of weeks it was completely unusable. None of the anti-spyware tools could clean it up, despite wiping out literally thousands of bad files.

In the end, I wiped her hard drive, installed XP, got her going on Firefox, and she hasn't had a problem since. End-o-plug.

Nice little summary. I just have something to add, check out Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client if you enjoyed the feel of Firefox. I haven't gone back to Outlook since my first time using Thunderbird.

I've been using Firefox since 0.91 (the final beta release), and I like it a lot. I don't use the tabs function as often as I should, but it opens multiple windows just fine. I love how it kills popups and animated banner ads; it's even better than the popup blocker in the Google toolbar for IE. (The built-in google link is a great thing too.)

However, I'm not entirely sold on Thunderbird. I had to fool around with the settings for quite some time before I figured out how to fix the defaults to allow outbound mail. I also dislike the extra step required to get mail into my inbox; Outlook automatically downloaded messages to my inbox, but I have to tell Thunderbird to download messages after it informs me that messages are waiting on the server. I also have to prompt it to check when I open it, which is asinine.