In all the reviews I have read of IE8 (and I read a lot of them), the feature that most IE8 testers seem to like are “Accelerators”, (i.e. context menus for web services).   Indeed, the estimable Jack Schofield seemed to like the feature, describing IE8 as helping “get stuff done” and having innovative features “not found elsewhere”.

Of course, that most fertile of jungles the Mozilla Add-ons community has an answer for Accelerators, or indeed, three of them: IE8 Activities for Firefox, Kallout, and Select-n-Go.  So far, I have tried Kallout, and mighty fine it was too.  Just as I suspect that Accelerators are a way for Microsoft to make its own (and other) web services more accessible, there is a conceivable opportunity for Add-On developers to offer any number of online services a customisation to make their service more accessible to the (burgeoning) Firefox user base.

One more observation: at least one other Mozilla employee in Eskilstuna remarked upon my own use of context menus for shortcuts as “epic” (and not in a good way).  But he might be right about my right clicking.  It does imply a huge bottleneck in the interface, one that Ubiquity seems ideally positioned to fix.  Anyone that likes Accelerators really ought to give that a spin.