Okay, I'm really enjoying Firefox. It's got some great features, and I've become addicted to tabbed browsing. I can get all new BBS posts loaded up and skimmed in half the time it takes me to do a similar pass in IE.

It's got a lot of advantages over IE, namely:

- Doesn't crash nearly as much as IE.

- When a link uses the "#" symbol to link a point later in the page (like the BBS does for new posts in flat mode), opening a new window with the Shift or Ctrl key properly scrolls down to that post. In IE, this only works if you say "open in new window from the rightclick", it won't scroll if you use the shift key.

- Fast. When loading up tabbed browsing pages in the background, it doesn't seem to slow down the foreground window.

- No popups.

- Cleaner user interface. Configuration screen is simple and clear.

- One button in its UI cleans all your cache, history, and cookies.



However, I still find myself needing to go back to IE for a few things. I'd like to figure out how to get these things working in Firefox, does anyone have any tips?

- Java applets won't play. I've reinstalled the Sun JRE about a dozen times attempting to get java to work on this thing and it still won't.

- In IE, I had a registry tweak which allowed for me to type a bunch of words (with spaces between them) into the URL bar and it would do a google search on those words. This works in Firefox by default, except that it does an I'm-feeling-lucky and opens the first page. I want it to give me the full google search result instead of I'm-feeling-lucky. (Yes, I know there's a separate bar for google search in Firefox. I prefer the UI all cleaned up so that I *just* have the URL bar.)

- I can use IE as an FTP client that can upload and modify files on the server. I can even make a link to my favorite FTP sites as "ftp://username:[email protected]". When I try to do this in Firefox, it says something like "Operation not supported".

- There is a registry tweak to make new instances of IE run in a separate memory space so that crashing one doesn't bring down all of my IE windows. Is there a similar setting for Firefox?

- http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/ is down. WTF?? There are some things there that I'm pretty sure I want to get. But it's been down ever since FireFox was released. How am I supposed to like Firefox and switch to it if their main support page is down? Guys, you need to plan for capacity with your releases, sheesh...