While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example.

QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are activated by clicking view -> toolbars in any Explorer window.

The Breadcrumbs addon (QtAddressBar) is extremely responsive and even displays links to subfolders (you can see the arrow off the Adobe folder above).

Brad blogged about using QTTabBar to add an up button in Vista a while back, but it also adds several other tabbed browsing functions. You can create groups to open several tabs at once, clone a tab, merge tabs from another window, undo tab closing, use hotkeys, and it even includes enhanced replacements for Explorer's standard buttons. It even maintains a list of recently closed folders for quick resurrection.

Customization offers tons of enhancements, like grid lines, alternating row colors, minimizing to tray, and a lot more. If you want, QTTabBar will restore your tab previous tab layout on launch - I use it to keep the Control Panel and my Printers close at hand.

These are two great addons for any Windows XP. .NET 2.0 Framework is required.

I like Tab Effect, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's useful. It's an extension for Firefox that adds a sort of rotating cube effect when you switch tabs. It's powered by DirectX 8, so it'll only work on Windows, and how well it performs may depend upon the quality of your graphics card. My graphics card, for example, is a piece of crap, which may be why Tab Effect performs a tad sluggishly. There's a slight delay after clicking on a tab and when the effect kicks in, and the rotation is a slower than I'd like.

Like I said, I'm not sure how useful Tab Effect is, but it's definitely a cool concept. We've seen this sort of effect with desktop-switching before, so tab-switching is a natural progression, but as it stands it's pretty limited. But it's only 1.0, so maybe after a few revisions it'll be mind-blowingly speedy, intuitive, and useful.

Oh, how cool. FaviconizeTab is an add-on for Firefox that does just one thing: It shrinks tabs of your choosing down to the bare minimum: Just the icon. While tab titles are handy to have, when it's a tab you have open all day like your RSS reader or (if you're me) Joe's Goals, the title is inessential and just takes up space. FaviconizeTab frees up that space, which gives the other dozen tabs you have open more elbow room. In its Options you can choose to activate it with a double-click, Ctrl-click, Alt-click, or Shift-click, or just use the context menu, and if you have Firefox set up to restore your previous session's tabs on start-up, FaviconizeTab will remember which tabs should be Faviconized. One feature I wish it had is to specify that certain bookmarks should always open "Faviconized"--maybe next version.

If you're an avid tabbed browsing fan and upgraded to one of the Firefox 2 betas or release candidates in previous weeks, you undoubtedly noticed that the new version does tabs a little differently, giving tabs a fixed minimum width and displaying scroll arrows at the ends of the tab bar if you run out of space. This isn't a bad behavior, but compared to Firefox 1 which would show dozens of tabs all scrunched next to eachother without making you scroll, Firefox 2, which maxes out at a dozen or so when you've got your window maximized at 1280x1024 (and who maximizes anymore, really?), seems a tad limited. Of course, there's a way to change this behavior if you're willing to poke around, and Lifehacker gives you the stop-by-step how-to. In short, you go to about:config and change the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting to something smaller, or 0 if you want to revert back to the Firefox 1 functionality.

The official Maxthon blog has a post that announces the release (finally) of the 2.0 public preview version of their IE-based browser. The link they point to (which is the one I'm linking directly to here) is sort of confusing, since there's nothing about the 2.0 preview version on the page you land at. You first have to create a Maxthon account, at which time they present the link to the preview version. Some clarifying information would have been helpful.

Strangely, once you download and install this version, a disclaimer comes up immediately with the following information:

Maxthon2 disclaimer:
Welcome to Maxthon 2.0 Community Preview version. By using this version,

You understand that:

1. This is not even an alpha version. It's only for you to know what we are doing.
2. The features in this version are not complete.
3. It may crash often :-)

You agreed that:

1. You will not disclose this version to other people or media, otherwise, your account will be deleted.
2.You will provide feedback.
3.You will not complain :-).

Now, press F1 to start your adventure.

Based on this, I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be pointing you to this release. But given that they posted it in their publicly-accessible official blog, I see no reason not to link to it. When I first read the disclaimer above, I thought it was telling me that I'm not allowed to talk about this release at all publicly. But after considering how ludicrous that demand would be, I came to the conclusion that by the statement "You will not disclose this version to other people or media, otherwise, your account will be deleted.", they must mean that they don't want anyone passing around the installer executable to people that haven't actually created Maxthon accounts.

If I'm wrong, I can't say that I'll be all that disappointed to have my account deleted - who wants to support an organization that would be that ridiculous and out of touch with the way the web and media works these days? And is account removal really any sort of significant threat? They can't possibly think that they're going to release software publicly, then bully everyone into not talking about it. But I hope I'm right and it's actually fine to be discussing the release, because Maxthon has long been the browser that made using IE tolerable for me. Yes, I've used IE 7 extensively - at least enough to know that it's not a reasonable browser answer for me.

In any event, it's mildly disappointing to see that after all this time and build-up to Maxthon 2.0, all we have so far is a sort-of public preview release (they call it pre-alpha) that obviously needs a lot of work before it's ready for prime time. It certainly seems snappy, but in my brief look at it, it appears to be missing some significant features from version 1. I'm also not sure that I'm a fan of the funky space-saving technique of putting the menu up centered in title bar, since that breaks a very significant Windows UI standard. But we are looking at a work-in-progress, so let's just hope the work keeps progressing. Maxthon is too important of a browser to not get it right.

Almost every time I post a Firefox extension that does something with tabs, someone comes along to inform me, "Tab Mix Plus does this!" Another six usually come along to say "OMFG Opera dd it first!!1" but that wouldn't make a very good Browser Tip, so let's talk about the former. Tab Mix Plus is a Firefox extension that can be handily described as the king of tab-tweaking extensions. It adds about sixteen thousand  (give or take) tab-related options to Firefox, many of which you'll find in other extensions, but Tab Mix Plus is the only way to get them all in one place. It adds essential features like duplicate tab (and duplicate tab in new window), undo close tab (or window), crash recovery,single window mode, and tweaks for just about every tab behavior Firefox has, plus some handy keyboard shortcuts. Check out the features guide (PDF) to see if Tab Mix Plus has your pet feature, or head over to Mozilla Update to grab the extension.

Though tab-switching with the keyboard in Firefox is as easy as pressing Ctrl Tab, but for some reason I've always found that using this method it's not very easy to find the tab you're looking for when you have many open. Stack Style Tabs is an extension that changes Firefox's Ctrl Tab functionality to something similar to Windows' Alt Tab task switcher. When you press Ctrl Tab a menu with the titles (and icons) of your open tabs (nicely uncramped compared to a full tab bar) pops up and remains visible until you release the keys. Pressing Tab with Ctrl held down lets you select the tab you want and releasing Ctrl will switch to that tab. Excellent!