I use the bookmark tool bar that is part of firefox. At the top you have the 3 bars above where your tabs are, the one with file, view etc, then you have the middle one and then the bottom one that bottom one is the bookmarks toolbar and you can create a folder there on that bar and store your daily used bookmarks in there, I have mine set up with several folders like forums, mail, music etc and in each folder I have my associated sites, if you just have a few sites you want to use then you can do that with out making folders, When you are at a site you want to use, use your cursor on the address bar and grab the little icon of that web address that is at the right end and drag it onto the bookmarks toolbar, then it will become a link you can click on.
to create the folders on that bar just right click on the bookmarks toolbar and choose new folder, then you can change the name to what ever you want. To put a site into that folder go to the website then right click on that folder and choose add bookmark here.
If you put individual sites on your bar and want to change the name or shorten it just right click on it and choose properties and there you can change that.
Here you can see how mine looks
{{gwi:1440581}}
click on that a couple times to get full size.
Now I only have 2 bars then my tabs I did away with my middle bar so, and moved some of the stuff that used to be on the middle bar up to my top bar, so I have that and then below that I have the bookmarks bar with my folders and fave sites there.

see if that would help you out

just thought of something else, on Widows xp there is an option to add faves/links down to your bottom task bar, if your right click on a clear space on the task bar you will see options there, toolbars, and one called links, if you check mark links it will give you the option to have the links toolbar down there and in the links toolbar you just add your favorite links and then can simply click there to access them, how ever it may bring them up in Ie it has been so long since I used that feature I really don't recall. But anyway that is another neat way to have links handy.
This is a pretty old article but it does cover nicely how much you can do with the links toolbar down in the taskbar area.
Links Toolbar

Thanks for that helpful info, Raven. My computing life will be lots quicker now.