def, I don't have links to .8 plugins, but if you go to websites of the plug-ins I bet you can download older versions there.

The mouse gestures are so cool that I always forget I don't have them in Windows Explorer. I want them in Explorer now!

Since I'm too lazy to experiment with browsers or to look info up on them, what's all this babbling about mouse gestures? Is it just that you can assign certain actions to certain mouse movements? (like the spell system in Arx Fatalis, if anyone played that)

It's something like that. If you click the right mouse button and drag the mouse left and release the button, you'll go a page back, if you pull to the right you'll go forward. Those are the only two gestures I use basicly.

yea. My gestures are mapped to the middle mouse button. Drag left for page back, right for page forward, up for top of site. There are many many many different gestures available, but those are the ones I use. May sound like nothing much, but it's actually incredibly handy. no more moving my mouse out of the page to go back/forward.

11b, you really didn't see any speed up? That's the first thing I noticed. ah well. The tabbed browsing is definetely cool as hell. Be sure ot check out some plugins if you have the time. I have a plugin that allows me to screw with my tabs...set colors, order them around by dragging/dropping, etc. I honestly don't use those features too much, but they're still cool.

Firefox loads pages a bit faster, but it's slower to start then IE.

ok, point, the initial browser load is slower. But that's because firefox isn't integrated into the O/S shell.

Well i got a scroller for goint up and 2 buttons on the (2) side of my mouse for going back and forward, sounds a lot easier than getting another browser

Of course i have an uber-cool mouse (although not wireless, but i prefer this one to the wireless one we got lying here)

bleh, I have a 5 button mouse too, but I don't use the other buttons. But, since I'm not convincing you in the normal fashion....

use Firefox or you will feel my wrath, puny mortal! I will tear out your soul and eat your spleen if you refuse!

Yea, Firefox surfs slower IMO. Especially if its a new webpage that hasnt been cached the images take a longer time to load.

Now on cached pages I can see where it might load faster but its not enough to make that much of a surfing difference.

So far the tab feature is the biggest one.

well, for me the page loads are faster. Something I've noticed is that IE doesn't seem to render the page until all/most of the graphics have been downloaded. in my experience, firefox will load the pages as soon as the page is done loading, then fill in the pictures as they come. Maybe that's not what you're experiencing, but I did on the two computers I run Firefox on. I prefer the firefox method.

And tabbed browsing rules.

This is what i found out after a few days of using Firefox 0.8 compared to IE.

- Small Pictures (GIFs, JPEGs) display on the screen as they are being downloaded. Which is cool because you can see them unroll onto the screen but in IE you just see them slapped on their once all of the Pic is d/l'd onto the HD. Simple, but cool.

- The "Remember Passowrd" function is better because as soon as you enter the login screen, both username and passoword are automatically entered without you having to type anything or place cursors.

- Obviously, Tabbled browsing. But only realy handy when running other apps along with the web browser. Tidies everything up with a simple CTRL+T.

The only negative thing i found was when i had to fill in an online form, and the broswer kindly told me that my web browser was not complatible to this so i had to use IE for that. But maybe as Arathorn sais (as i have understood him) that may be due to my older 0.8 version.

Perhaps, though some less professional (or more lazy) website developers build their pages for IE only. I believe there are standards for websites but Microsoft doesn't use them, so some websites might not work (like Windows Update).

I should upgrade to 1.0PR anyway, most plugins are already compatible with that version, I only miss Tab X.
0.8 might have some security leaks.

damn right. version 1 is faster anyway.

Lazy or not. It might just not work due to errors, I dont know.

And yes Sat, It seems i am having a few problems with Firefox and Java as you said. At the moment on Forms and Download Scripts.

As a result, i might D/L 1.0.

I use IE 5-5.5 (rarely 6.0) most of time because that's only what I have in these laboratories.

Firefox and Opera are fine things. They (especially Opera) have attractive design, tabs, well-organized offline work and they are more stable, as I see. But, I got my page (and some run-time dependent javascript features) unuseable in them so I prefer IE 6.0 yet. In general, I'd use Opera only if I can arse it to do well with javascript.

Btw, I have seen mods for IE which allows tabs and have better design than simple IE. Dunno what they are called with.