Well, Firefox just continues to impress.
I have managed to customize my tabs via the normal preferences as well as a couple of plug-ins to provide me the ideal browing experience.
First, all new tabs open in the background. For me, I like to be able to click on links in stories I'm reading but continue where I am.
Second, anything typed into the location bar is opened in a new tab in the foreground. See below what this means for keyword bookmarks. Obviously, if I'm typing something in then I want it right away (most of the time anyway :-)).
Third, Firefox supports multiple home pages. If you enter your home page as "http://google.com|http://yankees.com" this will open two tabs when you open FF or click "home."
Fourth, Firefox bookmarks support the notion of keywords. You can create a bookmark from a google search and replace the specific search with %s (e.g. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s). Edit the bookmark and create a keyword like "google" - now anytime you type "google amazon" in the address bar firefox will do a google search for you. I've done the same trick with Google Maps.
Finally, some nice extensions.
- Tabbrowser preferences - provides a nice interface for some advanced tabbing features that are not normally available through Firefox preferences.
- Last Tab - for the programmers of the world this is a necessity. It changes the CTRL-Tab behavior to go to the most recent tab rather than the next tab in order.
- Unread Tabs - if you open a lot of tabs (from RSS feeds for example) you can easily see what's not been read with this extension.