The last time we did a report on the operating system and browser stats was back in January 2009. In January Chrome was starting to take off as it passed 1% market share, and both Windows and Internet Explorer suffered some big blows as their competition scooped up some of their precious users.

I still feel like I'm in search of the perfect page that is displayed when I open up a new tab in my browser. I used to be one of those people who always used a blank page for performance reasons, but when I started using Opera more I really started to like having the Speed Dial sites at my fingertip.

I've seen extensions before that let you designate specific directories on your computer for files to be saved based upon the extension of file. The thing that I normally hate about this is that it's tough to say where I want the ZIP files I download to be stored.

It's not often that I come across a bookmarklet that I'll use everyday, but in the last few days PageZipper has become an unbelievable tool in my daily arsenal.

A few years ago we wrote about a handy bookmarklet that would make Firefox remember passwords on some sites that ordinarily wouldn't, like Yahoo! or Paypal. Some people on the article were reporting that this no longer works in Firefox 3, but one anonymous commenter referenced a rather clever workaround.

Over in our forum someone was wondering if there was a way to prevent Firefox from prompting you about updates to extensions you have installed. Th problem for some users is that Firefox will not continue to load if it is in the process of prompting you for updates. For example, let's say you have Firefox automatically start when your computers boots up.

It's definitely hard to believe, but after 6-months of being released the CyberSearch extension has been downloaded over 25,000 times from Mozilla's add-ons site. The stats page for our add-on appears to be a bit screwed up since it's only reporting that we have 3 active users, but the average number of you actively using CyberSearch is around 4,000... which is probably a bit more accurate.

There has been more talk about web browsers in the last few weeks than any time I can remember in the past. Google Chrome came out of the Beta phase, Opera unveiled the first Alpha release of version 10, Internet Explorer 8 is suspected to have a 3rd Beta coming in the next month, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was just unveiled.

Last week Cody sent me in a tip for an experimental Firefox extension that I just had to try out. It's called TooManyTabs, and it essentially adds another tab bar to your Firefox window where you can temporarily store some of your existing tabs. To do this all you have to do is hover over a tab, and you'll see the tab's icon turn into an up arrow (as seen in the screenshot above).

Mozilla is on the verge of releasing Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, and it's quite possible that in the next month or two the final version will be pushed out the door. A major new release like this means that some of your favorite extensions might not be working, and Mozilla doesn't want that to happen.