When I first started using what was then called FireBird and is now FireFox it was for one, and only one, reason — I had grown to hate Internet Explorer for all of the usual reasons. The tabbed browsing was a big plus, but I was ultimately just trying to get away from IE.
As FireFox nears its 1.0 release, however, it is a full-blown platform that is so far above and beyond Internet Explorer that I’m surprised everyone isn’t using it just for the additional functionality.
Microsoft keeps discussing its LifeBits project which someday might let you capture some or all of the web pages you visit automatically. Yawn. A free FireFox extension, Slogger can do that today.
Yes, other browsers have tabs, but FireFox has a number of extensions such as Tab Browser Preferences and Focus Last Tab Selected that allow the user to fine tune tabbed browsing to best fit you he or she works.
And then there are extremely cool experimental extensions such as Wikalong which turns the sidebar into a Wiki to provide a collaborative web-wide annotation system, and presumably user or group-specific ones eventually.
Thank goodness there’s a real alternative to that piece of crap IE.