With today’s release of Thunderbird, it appears Mozilla is starting to go somewhere decent. While it may be in it’s infancy, there are too many things that disappoint me to get on the bandwagon with Thunderbird and/or Firefox.
Sure, I prefer Mozilla products to the pitiful Microsoft alternatives. I have been using Mozilla Suite since 1.3, I believe. I don’t think I’ll ever change, this Suite covers my email, web browsing and is starting to support a calendar program to boot. I love it.
My problem is with the individual products of Thunderbird and Firefox. I first thought they would be standalone components of the Suite. While they share alot of the similarities, they are missing a few major things in my book.
Firefox is missing the ability to collapse the menu options for each line above viewing window unlike Suite browser. And you have to add on oodles of extensions just to get some Suite browser functionality. Needless to say, extensions are very cool, but some extensions don’t work, and then they are extremely tedious to remove.
Thunderbird lacks in similar areas too, but the major drawback to me is the lack of being able to open a link in any email in a new browser tab either in Firefox or Suite browser. Having browsed the support info, it looks like a nightmare to figure out how to do this onesself.
So I’m gonna continue to avoid the hoopla over the glamourous Firefox and Thunderbird and be excited about Mozilla Suite releases and updates. I just wish they’d name it something catchy and stick with it, unlike the debacle Firefox has been through.
Although I’m confused about why Mozilla has it’s plugins/extensions listed on numerous different sites, here are extensions I like for whatever Mozilla product:
Mycroft install various site searches
Foxytunes favorite music player controls in broswer
del.icio.us the ever popular metatagged online bookmark site