XTree's learning curve was not shallow, but once you got the hang of it you could amazing things. Select all thousand .c and .h files, recursively in a large directory tree, and copy those and only those (maintaining the directory structure!) to another drive? Fifteen seconds. Let's see if I remember how. Branch, Filespec *.c, Tag, Filespec *.h, Tag, Showall, Invert tag, Alt-copy branch, Relative paths. Boom, done. Rename all your jpegs in a directory with a prefix for the site they came from, but preserving the rest of the filename? No problem. You could even create a custom batch file in which you could create any commandlines you wanted, substituting in whatever parts of the file/directory names you wanted at various places.

For those who miss XtreePro, there is an excellent reimplementation called ZtreeWin (http://www.ztree.com/). It's still text mode, but is a native Windows app (no Command Prompt needed, supports long file names, etc). The author is very respectful to the XTree legacy but has also carefully added additional useful functionality. One of the few pieces of shareware that I've gotten enough value from to spend my own money to donate/register.

Another speed boost option that doesn't require patches is to specify on the commandline a cipher that has a lower CPU impact. I did some testing and found that on my systems, I could get 2-3 times the throughput on gigabit Ethernet when using arcfour instead of the default.

It's very easy; just use the -c switch, like this:

$ scp -c arcfour source destination

Note that arcfour is less secure that the default cipher, but for internal networks or traffic over VPN tunnels you may decide the speed increase is worth it.

Another vote for the Tab Mix Plus extension... you can set it to have multiple rows of tabs (I use 8 rows as max) and a minimum tab width (I use 120 pixels) so you can always read the title of the tab, without having to scroll along the tab bar.

It can also highlight unread tabs and show a page loading progress meter in the tab title.

I find it quite workable to have 20+ tabs open, because I can see what the names of the tabs are and tell which ones I haven't read yet.