I have three browsers (Firefox, Opera, and IE7B1) installed on all of my XP workstations. All of the browsers use the popular tabbed browsing interface. 

While I think that tabbed browsing is the coolest thing since sliced bread, I’ve noticed something about all of them that drives me nuts; there is no way to close a tab by right clicking on a page itself and selecting an option for “close tab”, the option just doesn’t exist.

Most of these browsers are similar in the way that they close tabs. You can right click on the tab (not the page itself) and select the option to close the tab, you can press CTRL-W to close the tab or click the “x” button for each tab (located to the right in IE7B1 and Firefox, located on each tab in Opera).

I don’t know if there is an extension for Firefox that allows me to do this, but I think that it’s something that should be built into all of the “tabbed” browsers.

I’m gonna submit this to the IE7 team to see if they can add it into IE7.

I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser at home for a while now, but I recently just got into installing extensions (plugins) to extend the functionality of the browser. I like how extensible Firefox is; it’s no wonder why Firefox is kicking ass and taking names against Internet Explorer.

Here are some of my favorite extensions:

• Spellbound (spell checker for text boxes – very useful for blogging – for some reason this is not the on Firefox extension web site)
• Adblock (blocks all the annoying ads on a site including those floaty ones that block your view)
  
• Tabbrowser Preferences (allows you to move your tabs around)
• IE View (allows you to open a page in IE just in case it’s IE only – saves time)
• Web Developer Tools (if you are a web developer, you must download this)

Get Firefox if you haven’t already and start downloading extensions.

I have found bug with the download manager in Windows XP Pro and Firefox versions 0.8, 0.9, and 0.9.1. It resembles this bug which is confirmed on Mozilla 1.7b with Windows XP Pro.

If you have the download manager set to show the download manager when a download begins it seems to hang the browser and explorer.exe for a few seconds on any download after the first one. It seems to happen when the download manager is recalculating the percentage and time remaining for each subsequent download. If I turn off auto notification, I don’t see the bug, but then I obviously don’t see my download statuses. This also happens when it recalculates percentage and time after it completes a download and still has one or more to go.

I’ll post my remarks to the bug listed above and see what happens.

I don’t know if this bug occurs in Linux but it does occur in the Windows version. Firefox will continually prompt you to update to version 0.9.1 although you already have. It’s a known bug, and here is the URL for it. Way down at the bottom it lists how to get rid of this prompt, but I’ll re-print in here for brevity.

Another bug that some of the users may be bitten by, is the fact that Firefox stores update data, so it'll continue to prompt you on startup.. For those of you who have this problem:
1. Go to about:config (in the browser window)
3. filter update.app
2. Right-click and reset each of these back to defaults update.app.AppDescription, update.app.updateURL, update.app.Version, and update.app.UpdatesAvailable 
3. Restart Firefox.
That should clear Firefox from thinking there's an update. and stop the prompt
from appearing on startup.

I’ve been using the Firefox browser as the main browser at home for a while now and it seems to work really well. There are only a few times when I have needed to open IE for anything. I’ve even switched my sister over to using it at her place since she was plagued by constant popups and other annoyances all of the time. I’ve gotten really used to using the Tabbed Browsing feature and pretty soon I’ll wonder how I ever lived without it.

There is one thing that is missing though. MyIE2 has a feature called Ad Hunter. Supposedly, this feature not only stops popup ads, it also stops Flash ads, floating ads, and gif ads! I really wish that Firefox would get this feature natively.