After I got fed up with IE’s terrible user interface and before Firefox became popular, I switched to Maxthon which provided an excellent UI on top of IE’s browser engine. It supports full-fledged tabbed browsing, session saving/restore and excellent manageability of full-screen browsing. Features like ‘auto-reload’ which let me load my stock quotes page periodically were really useful.
Then, I moved to Firefox – even Maxthon could not address the ActiveX menace and related frequent crashes, and I was bowled over by the incredible lightness and extensibility of Firefox.
But I missed Maxthon – Tabbrowser Preferences extension was a poor substitute to Maxthon’s tabbed browsing support, session management was not available and I was not able to auto-hide toolbars when browsing full-screen. Till I installed the great Tab Mix Plus and the cool Auto-Hide and ReloadEvery extensions to Firefox. Tab Mix Plus permits full-fledged tabbed browsing on Firefox. Auto-Hide hides toolbars during full-screen browsing so that I can maximize my browser display, while still keeping them accessible. ReloadEvery helps me reload my web pages every ‘n’ seconds.
It is this extensibility that makes Firefox the greatest browser around.
Finally, I no longer miss Maxthon.
I have a couple of gripes about Auto-Hide though – it does not show my tab bar if I position my tab bar at the bottom of the screen and move my mouse over it.