Anderson Che’s free and excellent AvantBrowser has been upgraded to v. 10.1. Some new features:

• Improved Speed/Stability.
• Allow multiple instances.
• Customizable mouse gestures.
• Customizable mouse buttons functions.
• Customizable tab to activate after closing a tab.
• More customizable standard buttons.
• Drop down button for history button, display last 120 visited web pages.
• New compact view.
• New: “hold the right button and click with the middle button” to close/refresh a window.
• New: Open In New Browser Item in the right click menu for links and bitmap.
• New: Getting Start Wizard dialog
• New Copy URL button on the float bar.
• New Open in New Window button on the float bar.
• New Favorite Context Menu Item: Create Favorite in This Folder.
• New “open recently closed page” menu
• Maintain Width/Height ratio when zoom pictures.
• Added Context Menu to group links
• Added Context Menu to Back/Forward drop-down menu
• Accept to drop a list of URLs, and open them one by one.
• Save options in “Open a Link” dialog.
• My personal favorite: right-click + scroll wheel scrolls through tabs. Sweet.

I know most geeks are diehard Firefox lovers, but I find AvantBrowser superior in several ways:

• Toolbars can be put on same line, and buttons can be moved between them
• URL Alias - I just type “gtp” in the address bar to go to my WordPress “new post” page
• Address bar-based custom query string - for example, “t ipod” could take me to http://technorati.com/tag/ipod. You can tell it where in the URL to enter your querystring, which is great for sites that use a predictable but obtuse querystring structure. For example, I could set it up so “nrsv matthew 6:15″ takes me to http://bible.oremus.org/?version=nrsv&passage=matthew+6%3A15&vnum=no
• Built-in “up one level” button
• Multiple home pages
• RSS feed support
• Integrated support for almost all search engines (no 3rd-party toolbars)
• Favorites Groups - open a bunch of predetermined pages at once
• Compatible with IE extensions & formatting

Firefox has lots of extensions and hacks that no other browser can begin to match. But AvantBrowser is just a good browser, certainly better than IE. I use it for most of my work on the web, switching to Firefox only when I need to use a developer extension.

Note to Avant Force: Please make an API so we can have AB extensions like we have Firefox extensions. Thanks.