Personally I like them down the right side. Makes better use of a widescreen monitor, since most pages are still vertical in nature. Also can see way more tabs at once. If you want to see what I mean:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8045

I personally go with Tree Style Tabs, since it lets you group related tabs. Otherwise I agree with you totally; I don't think I could stand going back to across-the-top tabs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

There's so much wasted space on the side of a widescreen. I've never understood why people want them for their computers, as opposed to tall screens. After all, we read across a short way, and downwards a long way.

Because our eyes are side-by-side. Have you ever rotated a pair of 24" widescreens vertically? They are taller than your vertical field of view.

Widescreens make sense for all sorts of things, especially video. Just because they don't make sense for reading lots of text doesn't mean the space is wasted. With a tiling window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org), you just put two windows side-by-side anyway.

I could see how that would be nice, though at work no widescreens and at home I usually dual monitor it with the laptop.

I was wondering what the hell they were talking about when they said the tabs were on the "bottom" when they weren't - they're still out the top of the application.

Someone's posted links to sidebar tab mod, is there one that actually puts the tabs on the bottom of the browser?

I use Tab mix plus

http://tmp.garyr.net/

1) For your keyboard surfing: vimperator.org vim-style keybindings for mouse-free browsing.

2) The URL & search bars are for the currently active tab, so they belong below the tabs. Visual hierarchy really helps make things easier to use.