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Dear Mike Elgan,

With previous versions of Firefox, you could just position your mouse pointer on the close box and close large numbers of tabs by simply clicking. Now, with the new version, you've got to slowly hunt and peck your way to closing Tabs -- just like IE

You might be interested in the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference. I believe you want to set it to 3.

Extensions such as TabMixPlus may also be of interest to you; as well as providing a gui for this (I haven't checked, but I'd be shocked if they didn't), they make visible a whole host of other functionality hidden inside firefox.

Thanks for your little rant though, it was amusing. I'm curious about why the preference seems to have changed value when you upgraded though - if you can reproduce it, it sounds like it would be worth filing a bug report about.

HTH, HAND!

(note to self: before writing posts like this, check the responses to see the thousands of other people telling him to do the same).

Daniel asked for more detail about how I use Google Bookmarks in Firefox.

Google Bookmarks, how do I love thee, let me count the ways...

The good old-fashioned way of course is with a bookmarklet

Bookmark pages more easily. Drag this bookmarklet to the Links area of your browser: Google Bookmark

(taken from the bottom of http://www.google.com/bookmarks - after one is logged in, of course).

Slightly more modern, there are a couple of Firefox plugins that do more than just add bookmarks. A once-and-(hopefully)-future shag of mine were lying in bed once, and in between cuddling and.. well, anyway, we looked on the net and found two plugins.

The first is the Firefox Google Bookmarks plugin. Works, kinda useful, but I found it a bit clunky. Lets you import Firefox bookmarks into Google Bookmarks; gives you a menu containing your google bookmarks...

The one I used to use (until, ooh, two days ago) was the Google Bookmarks Button. Does much the same thing, but I found the user experience to be a bit nicer.

Unfortunately I don't remember why I ended up favoring the latter; I seem to recall that it was some very small difference in UI that I preferred.

There's also GMarks, which I've not tried.

Most modern of all though - Google released version 3 of their toolbar for Firefox late last year. Taken from the Feature List:

New! Bookmarks
Want to create and label bookmarks that you can access from any computer? Simply click the Toolbar’s star icon, or right-click the star to add and label a bookmark. You'll be able to access your Bookmarks menu on any computer with the new Google Toolbar installed.

Doesn't import Firefox bookmarks, but at this point I'm not using them any more. Aside from that, does much the same as the others: there's a star button to click on to add a bookmark, and a drop-down menu to show the existing ones. The Google Bookmarks Button is better in some ways - it pops up a dialog so you can edit the title of the bookmark and the tags, whereas Google's button just adds the bookmark straight in, no editing, no tags. For the moment, all I want is a way to flag pages as things that I'm going to want later, so Google's button is fine.

There's a lot that del.icio.us does that Google Bookmarks don't do. I never used any of those features - it was just a dumping ground for stuff I want want to look back on later. If you're using del.icio.us for much else, you will probably find that Google Bookmarks is far too simplistic for you.

Way back in the mists of time (late '05 if memory servers), Google started offering a referral program through Adsense. One of the products in the referral program is Firefox: you put a button on your page (hint: bottom left-hand corner of this page) advertising Firefox, and Google gives you $1 for every user who clicks the button and follows through to install Firefox.

Fast forward a few months, and I've noticed something strange:

I've seen a few other sites as well - firefox2007 dot com is one. All these sites have is a large "Install firefox!" button, and the potential to earn the owner of the page $1.

Hrm. I can't exactly see what's wrong with this, but on the other hand, I don't exactly feel comfortable with it either..

It must be fun to be a company so large that people make profit entirely through the differential in what you pay for a referral vs what they have to pay you in order to get that referral.

Google has released Firefox Extensions

So far, we have a toolbar (looks to be the same as the IE toolbar), a "Send to mobile" option (that only works in the US), and Google Suggests for the inbuilt firefox search bar.

Nifty!

According to Google's firefox toolbar page the system requirements are:

. Windows XP/2000 SP3+, Mac OS X 10.2+, or Red Hat Linux 8.0+
. Firefox 1.0+

Presumably this will work on other distros as well...

It's nice that they still have a link to " . Googlebar, an open-source toolbar written by Google fans"

The page above also contains a link to a forum for users to discuss the bar. Useful information gleaned from the forum already: it does work on ubuntu, but isn't hugely pretty.

Hrm. Interesting google ads on the side of that last page. It's a page talking about a Google toolbar for Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, but Google has chosen to display this:

[inline:2]

(there's a larger screenshot below also)

I'd noticed firefox running a little slow..

So, remembering that a friend had mentioned to me a week or two ago that it had a nasty memory leak or 16, I took a look at top..

It had only 40mb resident in memory - but the total memory usage was almost 700Mb!

Closed firefox - which took about 60 seconds, with furious mad disk activity - I can only assume writing history and cache to disk. *woomph* 300mb of physical RAM free, swap usage dropped ~500mb (don't ask me how that adds up to just under 700mb, I really don't understand...)

Restarted it - within seconds it was back at a total size of over 200mb. It's now climbed up to almost 350mb - only 57mb of which is resident, thankfully.