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.