Following with my promise that if Mozilla Firebird could do all that Opera can, I would switch, today is the day. After not being able to sleep last night, I spent a couple of hours of the early morning playing with the extensions offered by various sources through Firebird’s Extensions Page.

So, to let you know what made me switch, here are the extensions that I am currently running: AdBlock (hides ads that you specify on certain pages, now I can surf CNN add-free); All-In-One Gestures (Opera-like mouse gestures); QuickNote (a little notepad that can be free-floating or on a tab); SmoothWheel (smooths wheel scrolling of pages so there aren’t any sudden jumps); and Tabbrowser Extensions (adds a lot of good stuff to the normal tabbing in Mozilla, like forcing new windows to open in tabs).

On top of all that, Firebird lets me arrange my toolbars as I like, placing the bookmarks to the right of the normal menus, and saving a line that is otherwise wasted. I think there is one other Opera feature tha I would like but can live without: ‘paste and go.’ This allows you to paste a URL into the address bar with paste and go so you don’t have to press enter after the paste. Same with the search box. This of course may be offered in some extension I just haven’t found yet, but we’ll see.