well I am now one week into my trial of Firebird and I will confess I have changed my mind about it. Although I've had some issues with it, the overall experience has been positive. I have, however, reverted back to using IE as my default, mainly because of the compatibility issues Firebird has with .Text and several internal MSFT sites, and these just caused my annoyances. But I think I will be leaving Firebird on my laptop. Here's why:

• I am getting addicted to Tabs. I know I can do this with IE add-ons like MyIE2 and I am about to download that again to check out the new version. Until i started using Firebird I couldn't really think of a reason I'd need to have multiple sites bookmarked together in tabs, but it is amazing how quickly I got used to the idea once I started using it.
• Google searching from the address bar. I know I can tweak IE to do this, but its nice having it as an out of the box feature.
• Is it faster? Not sure. Seems fast, but so does IE.
• More screen real estate? Sure but not a big deal.

Overall, I like it.