Alt-Tab:

You can continue to navigate without a mouse with Firefox. Once you alt-tab to a Firefox browser, just ctrl-tab to jump tabs. Besides saving valuable taskbar real estate, one of the reasons why I prefer tabs is that I can organize related pages into one browser instance. It’s normal for me to have multiple Firefox instances open, with multiple tabs. One Firefox instance might have web development stuff going (web site tab, web page source tab, javascript debug session tab), while another might be a visit to Slashdot with extra tabs related to the linked-to articles. If for no other reason, if the boss comes into the office, it’s nice to be able to kill off one of those browser instances easily.
Toolbar buttons:

It’s open source. Open up the code and modify! You ARE a developer right??? :p It’s not like you’ve got 4 kids or anything. Seriously though, I wonder how much work would be involved in writing an extension for this. Oh wait, someone already did:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1778

URL Address bar:

I’m not certain I understand your problem here. If I click and drag in the middle of a url it highlights the text. It’s only when I click and drag THAT, that it creates the shortcut object that is placeable elsewhere. That click and drag option is something that I actually use quite often. When I find a page that I know I’m going to visit often, I drag and drop the url down to the bookmarks toolbar for quick access. I can also click and drag it to an email or anything else and have the url “type out” for me. Click and drag a url in IE into something like an email in Outlook and you get a retarded attachment that most novice users are afraid to open. (Rightly so, since they can’t actually see the friggin url!) Btw, if you click and select text and then decide you screwed up and need to select something different, just single click anywhere in the url field and try again (’esc’ key works too).

As Paul said, two of my most favorite browser plugins is AdBlock Plus, and Flashblock. There is one more that I use and that is “filter set g”. This is an addin to AdBlock Plus and does a great job of blocking more ads (even Google’s adsense).

There are a number of other plugins that I use for work: “htmlvalidator” which runs validators on the page source and tells you what’s screwed up, “web developer” which exposes everything about a page and allows one to change things on the fly, and the komodo javascript debugger that lets me step through javascript on a live page through the komodo ide.

Btw, in response to your comment about IE vs Firefox and having to load the app and plugins on each computer, try to load IE on a Mac OSx or in a xwindows session. It really depends on what computers you’re tied to. At least in learning and using Firefox, you’re less tied to Microsoft’s One Ring. This is all really a non-issue anyway, there are “portable” versions of Firefox (and many other apps) here:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

All you need is a USB key with enough storage space and you can keep the program, your extensions, saved passwords, and your bookmarks with you at all times.

Take care.

Sincerely,
long lost friend

Really cool analysis, I really enjoyed it. Personally, I think the only reason people object to IE that is hard to ignore, is purely due to the development side of things. Microsoft’s apparent disdain for standards makes it hard to simply make a layout appear consistently between Firefox / Safari in one camp and IE in the other - they make it a tremendous pain in the ass, for no good reason.

For this reason, the development process for many web developers I know is like so: “Yay, the site works! Arg…now I have to make it work in IE too. Yay absinthe!” Eventually, though, the developer smoothes out the problems, and it ceases to be an issue for the user.