Firebird rocks

I just downloaded Mozilla Firebird, the stand-alone web browser from the good folks behind Mozilla. This thing rocks!! It makes Mozilla, a web browser/mail client suite, look clunky and slow! It loads pages super fast, has a super clean interface uncluttered by all the usual stupid IE icons/toolbars, and retains all the great features from Mozilla, such as tabbed browsing (which in my opinion is the most innovative browser feature since IE's auto-complete; I can't live without it now), pop-up blocking (works like a charm!), Type-Ahead Find (the browser automatically jumps to the link that contains the letters you just typed, hit enter to view link), built-in google searching (yeah I know you can just get the google bar, but this thing takes up almost no space on the toolbar), smart keywords (i.e. look up words at dictionary.com just by typing "dict ubercool" in the location bar), plus a bunch of other cool features that I'm forgetting.

I like to open up a bunch of different articles when I'm reading the NY Times. With Firebird, I just click on the links while holding down the Control key. Each page is opened in a new tab. The coolest thing is that the browser stays on the current front page and the new tabs open in the background! This means I don't have to switch back to the front page every time I open up a new article. Another cool thing about tabbed browsing is that I can create one bookmark for a group of sites, so that Firebird will open up Salon.com, NY Times, CNN, Slashdot, etc. in separate tabs simultaneously with one click.

Also, I didn't even need to run an installer! Just unzipped all the files to a directory and run the program. It automatically imported all my IE bookmarks at work without even asking. This thing is sweet!