Thunderbird and Firefox are go!

I've spent about a week now using both Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 - the separate browser and email components from Mozilla. Of course I've been a long time user of plain old Mozilla, pretty much since version 1.1. However I had been noticing increasingly infruiating random crashes when using Mozilla, usually at particularly inopportune moments. I decided that separating the mail program from the web browser was perhaps a good idea and since the functionality is virtually identical it looked like a good idea.

So far the experience has been pretty good. No crashes at all and no significant loss of functionality except that the Mozilla web page composer is not a part of Firefox. Therefore I either have to fire up Mozilla just to edit an HTML page or hunt down a new HTML editor. I've started looking at Visicom Media's AceHTML and CoffeeCup's HTML editor but haven't exactly been over impressed with either so far. I know both have heaps more functionaility than Mozilla's editor but if I'm going to pay for a tool I'd like it to be good.

Of the niggling problems I've discovered in switching to Firefox and Thunderbird I think the most significant are related to tabbed browsing and search integration. I can no longer middle click on a link inside an email and have it open the link in a new tab in Firefox - you can only do a regular click and have it open a new window. Neither can I enter an URL and hit control-enter to have it opened in a new tab. I don't like having a separate input box to enter web search terms - the old Mozilla method of just entering them into the URL area and scrolling down in the input box worked great. The upside is the separate search input area supports multiple search engines so I can now search directly in Google, IMDB, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Amazon etc. etc.

Overall I think Firefox is an improvement over Mozilla for the average user - it has far fewer options to bother with and they are presented in a more manageable way. For instance the privacy features are easily managed from the options dialog and a single "Clear All" button press will erase all your history, cookies, forms, passwords and cache that have been stored away by the browser.

Likewise Thunderbird is nice clean email client that I would recommend to anyone over Outlook or Outlook Express. If you look at the Thunderbird homepage you would be forgiven for thinking it was still in early development, or certainly not as mature as Firefox. However my experience is quite the contray - its basically just all the mail functionality of the regular bundled Mozilla product. As such its very stable and I haven't experienced any problems with it. The only unpleasentness I observed as that migrating your Mozilla mail profiles to Thunderbird isn't automated yet. You actually have to go and dig around in your Windows "Documents and Settings" directory and copy stuff over. However this was very straightforward once I found the instructions. Strangely migration from non-Mozilla mail clients is supported out of the box.

For anyone suffering from spam I can say I've been using Mozilla spam filtering features for about a year now and after a few weeks of training they work really well. If you have a folder of spam somewhere its easy to open it up and Supporting multiple mail accounts and multiple identities for each one it meets my every need.

While writing this I noticed that there is now a Thunderbird 0.7.1 release that supports saving a profile on an external USB device. That's great - now I can keep all my profile and mail etc. on a keychain and take it with me. This should also work for Agent J so she can move between work and home computers and still enjoy a full client based email experience instead of having to use web mail in one place or another. However it does make backing up of one's keychain of vital importance!

Now all I need from Mozilla is a decent address book and calendar tool - I still fire up Outlook to get this because its functionality for these is second to none in my humble opinion. Outlook contacts come prepopulated with so many fields I've never needed to add a single one. If someone can package together an LDAP server and a address book and calendar client as functional as Outlook I'll be more than happy to pay a few bucks for it.