Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button.
It was a godsend to be able to open new links in a tab, and to be able to see those tabs organised neatly in front of you.
Unlike today, back then Firefox had a clearly expressive value proposition: Use this! It has tabs! It will change how you browse the web!
Now the only value proposition is some wishy-washy privacy stuff that is much harder to sell people on, even if it's in their best interest.
They'll still use Chrome or Edge/IE, but will use NordVPN or ExpressVPN after seeing their favorite YouTuber claim that the VPN protects their data and gives them privacy...
...while still not using an ad blocker, which makes the VPN almost entirely worthless from a privacy perspective. At most, it blocks your ISP from seeing what you're doing.
In fairness, that is a nontrivial privacy win for a decent number of people.
What a fun time.
https://github.com/marklieberman/foxygestures
https://otter-browser.org/ (Tools → Preferences… → Advanced → Mouse → [X] Enable mouse gestures)
And although browsers are no longer distinctly better than each other, I still donate to Mozilla.
Opera added true tabs some versions later, while still hanging someway on the MDI-tradition.
I think I do this as a self-remedy for my ADHD, I am likely to allow an interruption to disrupt me but I do need to close the loop on whatever I was working on before an interruption. A window or set of open tabs is enough of a reminder to help me close the loop.
Then I sometimes, open links from comments, or Wikipedia etc.
Today i have more than 50 tabs open just starting from HN.
Some stories when i read I close, but sometimes when I think i need to reread or save for later.
After the week i usually have around 150+ tabs that i have left for later, I do the triage and I either save to my notes (like interesting, os dev articles, or rust or postgre optimization tips ...) or close.
And thats just for HN.
Tree-style tabs [0] in Firefox help to keep a train of "research" together.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I fully believe the extensions were really a huge part of Firefox' moat.
I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.
On a sidenote, I stopped using Opera when they included a torrent-client in their webbrowser. The amount of bloat was staggering.