Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

So, I've been using Firefox solid since 1.0 preview (and since about 0.9 in a lighter way) so I'm a relative newcomer. However, when I first came in Tabbrowser Extensions, or Tabbed Browser Extension, or TBE, was pushed as one of the few extensions to fully configure the tab browsing experience. I like keeping everything in one window -- even popups. This makes for a cleaner OS, less worry of popups being an issue, but it also leaves some issues. Like you can't see two windows at once -- but Ctrl-# key makes that a non-issue. The other thing I like about TBE is that it provides a way to store and retrieve tab sessions.

One thing that really brought me to Firefox was that, in the beginning, it always seemed much faster than Internet Explorer (IE). However, lately, I've been using IE when I want to open up a single page and have it work fast. Clearly, something had changed.

Now, with Firefox 1.5 RC1 out I'm looking to upgrade. So, I decided to check out to see if TBE supported 1.5 RC1. And I found that the author was unrecommending the extension! A few threads later and the link at the bottom later, I had discovered that really early on this extension was very disliked and later on most of the functionality had been folded into Firefox, but not all. This extension has been updated quite frequently over time, but even the author admits that it's huge and makes Firefox slow.

Ack! And I've been using it the whole time. *sigh*

So, I think I'll be dumping it with the upgrade to 1.5 RC1. Hopefully I'll be able to fully enclose all browser windows and get some form of session management with some other plugin -- or maybe Fx1.5RC1 has this support now. I've gotten so used to it I don't know if I'll be able to manage without it. Heh. Yah, right. Change is good and fun. Of course, I'll be looking forward to the speed improvements due to the lack of TBE and the speed improvements that have been made in Fx1.5RC1. That should make for a super fast system. ;)

XUL Apps > Tabbrowser Extensions > Advantage and Disadvantage - outsider reflex

UPDATE: Of course, after installing, TBE works just fine (as it did before)... but my spell checker extenshun doesn't. Doh! Now I have to decide if I really want to remove TBE or not. ;)

Posted by Shane on November 7, 2005 8:09 PM | Permalink