Beonex Communicator 0.8 ReleasedMonday June 10th, 2002Ben Bucksch writes in with news that a new version of Beonex Communicator has been released. Beonex Communicator is a Mozilla-based browser for 'mom and dad' users with a special emphasis placed on privacy and security. Version 0.8-stable is based on the final Mozilla 1.0 source code and is available for Linux and Windows. Has Ben changed that ass-disgusting Beonex icon yet? ... if it would optionally install all the cool stuff as well: - enable favicons - optimoz.mozdev.org - bannerblind.mozdev.org - jabberzilla.mozdev.org - enigmail.mozdev.org - additional themes - other language packages That's all the stuff wich is cool but hard to install for anybody who isn't really a power user... jobe Enigmail is near impossible to install anyhow. Once the word "commandline" comes up, you've lost 99.999% of all users - including me, unfortunately. PS. Don't forget the spellchecker (http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/) I'm assuming your in windows First make sure that you have pgp or gnupg working. Make sure that you have it in your path (and that if you are using gnupg you have it installed in C:\GNUPG\ you can use a different directory but it required changing some config options, so just put it there) to set a path edit c:\autoexec.bat and find PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;etc and add ;C:\GNUPG if there is no PATH statement just add PATH=%path%;C:\GNUPG after you chage that either reboot or type PATH=%path%;C:\GNUPG in the command line (note %path% represents whatever is currently set as path as you are not wanting to override path, just add to it) After that and once enigmail is installed, try enigmail:about If it freezes, PGP isn't installed correctly or it doesn't know where to find it, try going into mail and using the engimail/preferences menu. Hit the Advanced button and make sure the the path is set right. If it doesn't freeze, but gives you a Failed to access enigmail service! message. The version of enigmail and your version of mozilla are not compatible. Try using 1.0 and the 1.0 version of engimail Well, here exactly could a good distro help. Handling all the if's and doing a proper install of all that stuff (even installing gnupg, if required)... Wow, on a average linux distro you don't have to do anything. Everything is nicely preinstalled. Simply press the install button at enigmail.mozdev.org and everything is working smoothly. Windows seems to be only for geeks... ;) Asssuming you have GNUPG installed correctly, you don't have a to do anything in windows either. But the GNUPG installation in windows isn't automatic, and I doupt it is in linux. I can only speak for SuSe 7.1 and 7.3, but there it's among the standard packages and gets installed automatically. There are precompiled and preconfigured packages for most of the linux distributions. And if you are among those who want to compile and install everything by hand, it get's as hard as: ./configure make make install my "mom and dad" use mozilla 1.0. Weird. I thought Mozilla wasn't an end user product... Are they developers? The Beonex webpage should have more and more detailled info on what exactly the differences and enhancements over Mozilla are. Most people simply wont download 10MB to find out themselves (and maybe realize that there are only few or no relevant ones anyway). I cant see what they do to make their browser compile in any way more simple to use than plain old (hehe) Mozilla. <http://www.beonex.com/communicator/doc/vsmozilla.html> I've read the "Beonex vs. Mozilla" page, and I think the idea of an open source, end-user oriented Mozilla distribution is a good one. But I would like more details on the actual differences between the two browsers from a user's perspective. The only explicit differences I've found listed are: * No revealing "Referrer" * Cookies are deleted at shutdown and the "Cookies" feature is easily enabled in Mozilla. There are other differences listed (ease of use, optimized code) but without enough detail for me to know exactly what benefits I'm getting. The other benefits listed don't seem to offer me much over Mozilla. Beonex is right that Mozilla disavows supporting end-users. But Mozilla has an active user community and is very responsive to bug reports. And Mozilla doesn't seem to have any problems attracting and funding development. Nor does it seem to need any help with getting press coverage. The easy add-on install page does seem nice, but does it really require a new browser, or could it work just as well with Mozilla? To summarize, Beonex could offer something that Mozilla doesn't, but I don't see much difference yet. I've asked this before and I'll ask it again since nobody seems to (want?) to answer it. What kind of user base does Beonex have? How many downloads - roughly? I mean, I know that you can't really know cause every person can copy it to other people etc. but the number of downloads surely tells SOMETHING... So.. what's the figure? |