That's the one bit of idealism that I allow myself. If a service can't offer a Firefox friendly version I assume that they are either totally incompetent or don't care at all for their customers and neither are qualities that I seek or am willing to accept in a service. I usually browse with the latest FF trunk build, because I just love to see what's cooking and because it means that I can file bugs before a release is out the door.
As for Thunderbird: I've seen many people try to push Thunderbird or similar solutions onto persons who are clearly comfortable with their web service... and that just doesn't make any sense. Even if you love a certain mail app, it's not a good idea to try to force somebody to use it. I just wanted him to remember that.

You can easily set it so that certain sites will always open in IETab automatically instead of the default Firefox. I do it with Netflix and Windows Update, so I never have to think about it.
It also puts a simple to use button on the toolbar that will allow you to switch from default FF to IETab instantly and reload the "offending" site.

then i shall.

Yeah, that wasn't even an edit - it was a new post. It somehow got edited into my previous post in the thread. I have no idea what was going on with the forum software, but I decided that going to bed was more important than fixing it...
And I think I'll try clamwin out at some point. It seems to have some popularity, or at least rabid promoters. :P

The forums have a new feature where if you double-post, it automatically merges the two posts into one and marks it like an edit.

on the girlfriends lappy, I don't think she'll notice it's FF. except for one little icon in the lower left hand corner, added by ietabs to let me know what goddamn code i'm using
edit:
nvm i nixed the icon, seamless integration now.

I just tried Enso thanks to you and it is every shade of awesome.

XP? Vista isn't that bad. Even Windows 7 is pretty good as a stable OS. But if you're going to go for Windows 7, the sound has some issues. I tried to watch porn and the sound didn't work.

I can't guarantee porn-compatibility, but I can say that I didn't have any issues so far with sound using MPlayer, CorePlayer, Foobar, Firefox (video element) or any game using the default drivers for my VIA chip..

macbooks do not have sound drivers that work in windows 7 yet.
so I went back to xp, but I'm back with a vengeance baby. anyway, I really like having dark backgrounds with light text, it feels a lot easier to look at. so I'm looking at replacing the windows shell, anyone have any recommendations? something other than litestep maybe?

The only Windows shell that I ever used for an extended period of time was one of the Blackbox variants (I think bb4win). The big plus over Litestep is that it's fast and lightweight. Seriously fast and really, really lightweight. Replace Explorer as filemenager with something smaller like xplorer² and you can easily get rid of 100MB of memory usage. That and the fact that it uses fast gradients for all drawing instead of slow Windows controls make for a great experience.
The downside is that it can be a pain to set up. Most configuration is still done through config files and some stuff that you'd expect to be part of the core is actually provided by plugins, which might have their own config files.

I'll see about giving bb4win a try, right now though I'm having extreme difficulty with my wireless and would like to use something other than wireless zero configuration, but unfortunately Apple doesn't have one for bootcamp, that I'm aware of. Is anyone aware of a sort of third party broadcom manager?
what's happening is that the wireless zero configuration won't show me any wireless networks (or will intermittently) and it also won't connect to my network (broadcasting off, wpa2) Sometimes it does, but it says limited or no connectivity.
I've released/renewed, unbound tcp/ip/rebound it, uninstalled/reinstalled drivers, disabled/enabled the connection. I can't find anything else. I think the issue might be with the wireless zero configuration..

I think I figured out what caused my wireless problem, I had set my router to use a frequency it didn't originally support.