Another app similar to ShortPopUp is 7stacks (like ShortPop, also potentially laggy depending on the settings used).  The "Menu" stack type would be the one appropriate for the OP; because 7stacks is designed to be pinned to a taskbar icon, the other stack types appear at the bottom of the screen, but they use the Windows 7 Aero interface.

With regards to Chrome, that's pretty good to know about. Have you tried them? Did you notice any change in speed at start up or page rendering?  Any CPU usage increase?

-dantheman (August 30, 2009, 07:35 PM)

I've tried other addons, but I haven't tried those two (I'm not a gestures enthusiast).  I've had mixed results, but I was playing with it when the installation process of an addon was not very intuitive, and highly dependent on the version of Chrome installed.  It's apparently gotten easier as Google has introduced more support for such efforts.  There didn't seem to be much of an impact on performance, but nor was I overladen (like I tend to get with Firefox).

However, I had problems with a couple of sites that worked fine before the upgrade to the development version, but ceased to operate correctly afterwards, so I've since downgraded.  I haven't tried again in some months, so those issues may have been ironed out.  So I've been going back and forth between Chrome, which is quick and great for most purposes, and Lunascape for the odd site that refuses to work in Chrome (I'm looking at you, Netflix Instant Play and Microsoft OfficeLive).
EDIT: I retract the disparaging remark about Netflix.  I just tried it, and the Movie Viewer works in Chrome once again, and now I don't even have to change the useragent to IE to make it work.  (Yay!)

(Re: Lunascape)

One "pre even using it impression" is that I downloaded the 9MB from the site, as part of the install it proceeded to download webkit and gecko .exes adding ~19MB to it. For testing purposes alone (not its other features) one could do alt-tab and load sites in the 'original' browsers.

-rgdot (August 30, 2009, 09:43 PM)

Sure, but that takes a bit more than 2 quick clicks on the engine icon in the lower left corner.  The other way you've got involves copying the address from the address bar, launch the other browser, paste the address, hit Enter (except in Chrome you can right-click to "Paste and Go") and then after any change you make to the site, you have to Alt+Tab around, remembering to do a manual refreshes as you go back and forth between each browser.  It's surely not rocket science, but if you need to make a series of small changes, it's unwieldy and can get confusing.

On the other hand, the various small interface issues still make me loathe to use Lunascape as my main browser.

Re: Chrome
There are addons for Chrome.  See e.g., mychromeaddons.com and chromeplugins.org.

You'll need to change to the beta or developer channel for Chrome, however.

Here is a mouse gestures plugin.
Here is an ad blocker.

If you don't want to change to an early-release version, you can always find a general purpose gestures app that will work for any application that doesn't have built-in support, e.g., gMote.

Re:Lunascape
Obviously, it's great for web designers who want to test how their website displays in each of the engines.

I quite like the ability to change engines and even set certain pages to automatically change to the engine desired.  However, there are some odd interface quirks, and for some reason it wouldn't set itself to default browser, despite clicking on the button to do so.  I had to use the Default Programs app for Windows to do it.

As far as vulnerabilities, it's not like you're using all three engines at once.  Because of its smaller market share, malware creators don't target Webkit (and Gecko for the most part) like they do with IE.  I would argue this is much better, because you have the option of using IE where a poorly-designed website requires it, but otherwise you can stick with another engine in large part.