Instability in FireFox – solved.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve found myself not using FireFox as much as I had been. This is usually an indication that there are problems with the app that are making me not like it, or just ‘get in the way’. I found myself running Konqueror more, which has its own quirks.
Today I settled into trying to figure out what was annoying me. FireFox had been doing silly things like if a page refreshes automatically (like, say, my My Yahoo news page, it would raise the window to the front, and NOT give it focus. This was annoying as all git out, because every 10 minutes my FireFox window would spontaneously POP to the front of the screen. Not good!
I had seen a few other crashes and other oddities, so I ambled over to #firefox on irc.mozilla.org (note that link may not work for everyone), and posited my problems.
Apparently a while ago I had installed the Tabbrowser Extensions otherwise known as TBE from the FireFox extensions library. This extension gives you amazing control over the tabs in FireFox (tabbed browsing is the cat’s meow – if you’re not using it, by using, say, an inferior browser, you should seriously consider upgrading).
Unfortunately, the TBE is known to have SERIOUS stability problems, and apparently is the first line of defense when someone say “I’m having problems with FireFox”. Sure enough, after I disabled the extension, things got MUCh smoother – the auto-raise behaviour stopped, and FireFox seems more stable.
The one behaviour I absolutely needed was the ability to re-order tabs. If I had tabs “a”, “b” and “c”, and I was viewing “b”, and hit the middle mouse button to open a new tab on a link, after I closed that window (usually with ^W), FireFox would show me tab “c”, and there was no way to fix that (it should have bopped me back to the ‘previously viewed’ tab, that being “b”.
Going through the above link, I found MiniT which looked about right. I installed it, and voila! I can simply drag one tab to another position on the tab bar, and since FireFox closes tabs from right to left, it’s easy to put them in the order I need.
Thanks to the folks on #firefox for pointing out the flaws in TBE.