There are probably extensions that address your concerns; for example, Tab X will put a close button on each individual tab.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/clav/#tabx
Seek out extensions; there's millions of them, and they generally all exist to fix one particular UI annoyance that bugged the author. Mix and match until you've got nothing in your way.
Huh, interesting.
I kind of dislike the idea of super extensibility...on paper it seems great, everyone can get their "perfect browser", in reality it is A room for a lot of incompabilities and things to break, B makes it tougher to use someone else's setup of the same program, and C might retard trying to reach consensus on the "best way" of doing stuff--or at least making it an option in the setup. I suppose A and C might be met by a process of rolling in the plugins to the core, but then you get that thing where the # of options is way to big for non-experts to want to cope with...
CTRL +F really does search input fields. Well, it does for me.
I agree with you in part about the new window thing; having a clone of what you're currently working on is handy, but it can also really confuse some password based things (such as an online multimedia course I do); having what's basically a new start helps with this.
As for blank tabs, I think the idea is you're opening them to put something in, so why should it take up any resources opening either your home or a clone page?
However, I really think this is a matter of what you get used to - although I think Firefox's use of CTRL +L is streets better than IE's :-)
Plus, of course, Firefox is open source (yay!) and in practical terms is more secure than IE by some way. And, of course, it has a large, vibrant and above all *responsive* community waiting to fix it when it does go wrong - unlike MS's approach of 'Bah, we can'tbe bothered fixing that bug we've known about for months'.
As for plugins....I think they're a mixed bag, and I tend not to use them myself.
Catherine:
re:ctrl-F...odd, that...I keep retrying but never get your results
re: "confusing password based things" -- honestly that's the webmaster's problem...any security system based on the way popular browsers behave when used by everyday users is rather suspect to begin with...
re: blank tabs...worrying about resources over the user experience is pennywise/poundfoolish...you could (possibly) extend your argument to say why have support for a startpage at all?
re: ctrl-L -- I know you like that "in place" editing for the URL, but IE *has* that...alt-d is the exact synonym for ctrl-l. And IE's ctrl-O "type in URL or hit browse" has firefox's ctrl-O "browse your files" beat I'd say.
Still, minorish points. In all, I forgot one of the main advantages of firefox...you feel like less of microsoft's bitch. In fact, if firefox has pretty much the same look and feel cross-platform (I don't know how much native Windowsism has snuck in) it could help in easing the way to other platform use...browser is easily 75%+ of my total computer usage...
You're right, I keep forgetting about alt+d. But being less of Microsofts bitch has to be good.
according to www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/error.html , "definitely" is misspelled about 20% of the time on certain usenet groups. The study says that "definately" is the most common misspelling, used 17904 times out of the 22766 misspellings of that word.
See, I wasn't going to mention that. But now you have, y'know...it's eay to get wrong :-)
fine, I ran spellcheck. :-P