As a strong supporter of open-source thingies, I’ve been using Mozilla pretty much ever since it went to version 1.0 way back when. It’s been a good program, very standards-compliant (unlike IE) and a great email reader (unlike Outlook) with wonderful spam-filtering built in (again, unlike Outlook). But lately the team over at Mozilla.org has split the “Mozilla Suite” into its two components, so they can be developed independently (and thus to even greater potential). The browser became Firefox, and the mail & news reader became Thunderbird. The other day, I gave them a try at home, and after some finagling to get my Mozilla settings imported properly into the two programs (they don’t import automatically – yet, not from Mozilla anyway, but they DO import your IE and Outlook or Outlook Express settings) I really came to like them. Mozilla itself will be slowly phased out, and so far all the new development (skins, plug ins, extensions, etc) have been focused on the two new products. And let me tell you, I REALLY like ’em. So much so that yesterday I converted my office computer from Mozilla to Firefox & Thunderbird. The programs load faster (because they are smaller) and you can work on something demanding (such as downloading a lot of email) in one program without affecting the other. Of course this would be less of a problem if I had, say, 2 CPUs, but I don’t, so I like the two executable approach – different processes (although both multi-threaded) make things faster for us poor single processor users.
Another great thing about Mozilla stuff is that you can get it for just about any OS: Windows, Mac, Linux, IBM, Sun, and probably more that I don’t even know about. Coolness!
And, in reference to my previous post about RSS feeds & whatnot, there’s an Extension (kind of like a plug in) for Thunderbird called Forumzilla, which you can pick up over at update.mozilla.org. It’s how I read my RSS & XML feeds, and it’s DA BOMB. No, really, it is. Give it a try… right now in fact.
Cheers,
-Keithius
