It apparently gets otherwise smart people very riled up to learn that I still use an Internet Explorer shell as my primary browser, so here is my defense and explanation.
In the screenshot above, you see the top-left corner of my desktop - it establishes a simple hierarchy that moves diagonally (with a bit of wiggling) from top left to bottom right - Application Launcher > Application Chooser (taskbar) > Web App Chooser. Laid out as it is, the app list in the taskbar is far more expandable and useful than the default bottom-aligned taskbar, however it is the 'Web App Chooser' that is the most important, and is the core feature of the amazing iRider browser.
iRider is a tabbed browser, but tabs in iRider have two important properties - they can be pinned, and they are hierarchical. As an example of the former, see the slashdot, gmail and bloglines tabs - they are pinned, and will remain there even if I close iRider or drag-close all tabs (more on this later) - this is essential given that apps like gmail and bloglines are just as (or more) important to me as desktop apps, and I need them readily accessed at any time.
The heirarchical nature of the tabs can be seen below in the 'Cheese - Wikipedia' section - from here you can see that I've started reading the 'Cheese' entry, and have opened tabs for 'pasteurization' and 'home cheesemaking', and from there have dug deeper - the tree of tabs lets me know how each tab relates to the others, allowing me to maintain a tree of thought and to quickly switch contexts with minimal confusion and impact.
Opening multiple tabs at once from a page is a matter of selecting the text in the page that contains the links, and pressing the 'surf-ahead' button (normally right-mouse, but middle-mouse for me so as not to interfere with StrokeIt). This feature is especially handy for opening every image in one section of an online image gallery. Closing off or pinning a 'train of thought' is similarly easy - just click on the little 'x' or 'o', and drag upwards to close/pin as many windows as you want at once.
Once I got used to these features of iRider, I found that no matter how much I tried, I could never make FireFox my primary browser. I've stated that as soon as someone makes a FireFox extension that does it, I'll switch, but so far I've tried the various tab plugins, but they lamentably never came close. Perhaps I should do it to learn more about FF extension creation.
Of less import, below the apps in the taskbar, you can see a webpage I created and added to the taskbar that screenscrapes a few news and weather sources every 15 minutes and presents them in a format I like. It's not normally that high, giving more room for the app list, but I put it up there for the sake of the screenshot. It's a recent addition, and I'm currently testing various styles and types of information (eg latest forum post headlines), it's all very interesting trying to make things sit on the edge of cognition without interruption. Perhaps I should look further into the Longhorn Sidebar research that went on before the sidebar was scrapped.
FWIW, I ran into iRider a long time ago in this post on Scoble's weblog, which mentioned that one of the guys on the IE team really liked it, so I gave it a bash, didn't like it, then eventually gave it a longer and more thought-out go, after which I bought it and have never looked back.
Soon up: Fitts' Law, Dragging, and how they relate to the positioning of my desktop windows.
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