FF4

I installed Firefox 4 partly because I simply wanted the speed improvements and partly because of newest-gadget-syndrome.  I'm pleased to report that I am digging the loading speed improvement immensely.  As for the better handling of memory, even with the feature where it will unload unvisited tabs after some time and it can be set to not load all tabs at startup, I find myself again running into the issue of FF taking up way to much memory and slowing to a crawl.

The fatal flaw with FF4 was that they didn't go far enough and just up and swallow the BarTab add-on, the first or second most critical addon in my FF arsenal.  I was really dismayed that BarTab hadn't been updated to work with FF4 yet.  I tried the tweaks and suggestions to get some of that functionality that's built-in to FF but it just doesn't hold water.  I need the ability for tabs to explicitly be unloaded exposed, preferably with a rightclick menu and a menu item to "unload all other tabs".  When FF gets slow, this has helped a lot with BarTab.

Thankfully, I just found a hack to get BarTab mostly working with FF4, and it must be treated as Beta.  There's already the issue where tabs don't load automatically when clicking on them but pressing F5 is the just price I will pay to have the ability to unload tabs.  We'll see though, maybe it will get too annoying.

On a side note, I get really annoyed in the discussions from people imposing their view that you should never have more than a few tabs open.  There's merit to the notion that you shouldn't keep more tabs than you need open, but there are lots of times where I do need many open simply so that I do not have to constantly look for previously opened sites.  Case in point, I have a bunch of tabs open to a set of Python modules and related info.  I just need the page loaded once so I can click on the tab to look something up, I don't want to have to close it and load it up again when I need to look it up again.