Ben Goodger posted on the movable type forum, to let them know what was in store.

Asa Dotler reveals more cool stuff that you can do with web panels: grabbing any page into a web panel. This sort of sound like a Haystack UI continuation, but that's not exactly right. But the idea is there. You bring up some UI interaction (browser based), you need to stop in the middle to find info for it (like a link to insert), so you can freeze the interaction into the web panel.

Phil Rignalda calls web panels Firebird's next killer feature. This would be after tabbed browsing and popup blocking (both of which debuted in Mozilla).

Ben Goodger has made it possible to selectively disable plugins in Firebird, so that instead of viewing Quicktime, Acrobat, and other files inline, you can download them instead. It'd be even nicer to be given the choice.

There are a lot of nice feature in Firebird and going into Firebird -- I'm almost ready to stop using Mozilla and switch over to Firebird (I've already moved onto Thunderbird). Both Firebird and Thunderbird have the buzz around them. There's energy, and activity. The cool stuff is rolling in quickly. It seems like all of a sudden the guys have hit their stride. Not like they weren't working hard before. Maybe its the Mozilla Foundation, maybe its the ability to drop all the cruft, who knows. But these folks are picking up velocity and thats good for them, and for us.