Making the Switch
Inspired by the thunderstorm that drowned my afternoon outdoors plans, I geeked out indoors and switched over to Mozilla Thunderbird, the open source, stand-alone email client from the Mozilla Foundation. Though it’s only a 0.1 release, it’s a fully featured mail client as it is based on the core technology of the mail component of the Mozilla 1.x Browser Suite.
I jettisoned Internet Explorer last fall and switched over to Mozilla 1.2.1 for web browsing and email (at home — Outlook is required at work). Mozilla was designed as the replacement for the Netscape 4.x generation, and, as such, it had some requirements to match features in that clunky old browser. Mozilla 1.x was overkill, as Netscape products are.
Earlier this year, though, the Mozilla Foundation released Mozilla Firebird, the first post-Netscape browser from Mozilla. It is sweet! Amazingly better than IE.
I’ve been using Firebird exclusively, at work and home, for about six to eight weeks now, and haven’t had a single problem with it. The availability of extensions means that there’s no end to the customizability of this browser.
Today, I finally got around to it’s sister application, the Thunderbird mail client. I hung onto the Mozilla suite’s mail client at home because when I had previously tried to migrate my mail profiles (by hand — it’s a 0.1 release, so there’s no automated migration), I couldn’t get it to work. Today I came across some more recent directions for migrating mail folders apart from the profile that worked smashingly. I’ll have to re-train its Bayesian junk mail folders, but since I switched ISPs a few months back, my new address isn’t on as many spam target lists so that’s not a big problem.
By the way, I also highly recommend Sebastian Delahaye’s Firebird and Thunderbird installers. Since these aren’t 1.x releases, the downloads from Mozilla.org are notfull installation packages. Makes upgrading hard. [Update 10:09pm -- forgot the "not" italicized a sentence or two back. That statement was inaccurate without the negator. In the words of the prophet: D'oh!. Though the installers take care of install and upgrade issues, I should probably also mention they are 'unofficial,' FWIW.]
So now, at home, I’m using an open source browser (Mozilla Firebird), an open source email client (Mozilla Thunderbird), an open source office suite (OpenOffice), and an open source graphics program (Gimp) . . . which accounts for the majority of the time I spend on my computer at home.
The only thing keeping me from totalling geeking out and switching to GNU/Linux as my operating system is Madden NFL 2003!
[By the way, I'm on vacation until after Labor Day, so postings will be slim to non-existent.]
I have been using Firebird for a few months. On Linux it is flawless. On Windows XP it has a persistant forms but that causes it to crash every few days. It also has some obscure Javascript bugs I encountered while coding a desktop aggregator. Still, its comparitive speed and stability makes a much better choice, even on XP. Can’t wait to try Thunderbird.
I’m running Firebird on XP, and it has been pretty flawless — certainly way more flawless than IE was.
The only problem I’ve experienced has been an occasional locking up of tabs — they all go grey and you can’t switch or close any of them. And that only happens about once, maybe twice, a month. I suspect that bug has more to do with the Tabbrowser extension module, which, though it may be responsible for the one bug I’ve encountered, more than makes up for it by adding a gazillion nifty functions to tabbed browsing.
Firebird gets the best compliment I can bestow upon software — When using Firebird, I forget I’m using it.
The 0.6.1 release fixes the crashes related to the persistent forms on Windows. It still has the bug that you can’t *disable* those forms.
Some layouts seem to give it fits – a notable case for me is the front page for Penny Arcade.