Could I suggest the ability to hover the mouse pointer thing over a thread title and it pops up a preview of the first line or so as more and more threads tend to have none specific titles or are just links to youtube and the like. It's just something I've seen on other forums.

There is a firefox add on which allows you do this but I can't remember what it's called

Its not just a browser addon, some forum software does it too. One for ChrisW to answer I guess.