Yahoo! News Tech Tuesday Recommends Mozilla 1.6 and Mozilla ThunderbirdTuesday February 17th, 2004Jude Cooks writes: "Yahoo! News Tech Tuesday declares Mozilla 1.6 'Best Free Browser' and Mozilla Thunderbird 'Best Free E-mail Client' on the web. Mozilla 1.6 'offers pop-up ad blocking, tabbed browsing, zoom controls, chat, and a mess of other features you won't find in Internet Explorer... once you try Mozilla, you'll never go back to IE.' For Thunderbird, 'As easy to use as Outlook Express (and in many ways better).'" The content of the article comes from the team at PCWorld.com. yahoo.com's main page on mozilla doesn't feature the cool dhtml tabs! Yes, but it's strange... looks like a mistake. For example, Yahoo Argentina features them on Moz: http://ar.yahoo.com/ Odd how they recommended the Suite and Thunderbird as opposed to the Suite twice or Firebird and Thunderbird. You have Mozilla Suite's web client and Firefox. You have Mozilla Suite's e-mail client and Thunderbird. It seems they preferred Mozilla Suite's web client over Firefox and Thunderbird over Mozilla Suite's e-mail client. I don't find it that odd... Not only that I don't find it odd, I fully agree with it. The Mozilla Suite Browser (aka "Navigator") is my favorite. Don't get me wrong, FireFox is good, but there are at least ten different things that Mozilla 1.6 does better. As for Thunderbird, it is my favorite mail client, although Mail&News is *very* close. Prog. Like what? Like the ones mentioned here: http://emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=143297#post143297 Prog. I think this is the power of Mozilla. You have more than one choice for browser and for email client. Each being slightly different but still customizable. Mozilla will have a 2 pronged attack against the MS machine. My reasons are: master password, form manager configuration dialog with all settings (much easier than about:config) ... I was going to say that it's not possible to pause downloads in Firefox, but I just discovered that this doesn't work in Mozilla either :( Huh? the standalone browser has always had pausing downloads. I tested 0.1 - 0.8. It inherited the ability from Mozilla. But in testing this I found an interesting tidbit. Phoenix 0.1 has the download manager from the suite. 0.2 on does not have it. Why did they do away with it. I know the new one is different but still why remove it only to add it back much later. I found in Mozilla the download manager itself doesn't allow pausing (1.4) but if you click on properties of a download you can pause it there which is the same download dialog the standalone browser uses up to 0.7. 0.8 has the pause option in the download manager itself now. Someone preferring Suite over Firefox doesn't surprise me, but also preferring Thunderbird over Suite does. What advantages does Thunderbird have if you already have the suite? Taken from the Thunderbird project page: # The ability to customize your toolbars the way you want them. Choose View / Toolbars / Customize inside any window. # UI extensions can be added to Mozilla Thunderbird to customize your experience with specific features and enhancements that you need. Support for extensions. Extensions allow you to add features particular to your needs such as offline mail support. A full list of available extensions can be found here. # A new look and feel. Thunderbird also supports a large number of downloadable themes which alter the appearance of the client. # An addressing sidebar for mail compose which makes it easy and convenient to add address book contacts to emails. # Online help includes a FAQ, tips and tricks and other useful information. # Simplified preferences UI and menus. # Footprint and performance improvements. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird I did say that "Mail&News is *very* close" didn't I? but there are some differences. Prog. Thunderbird is a great mail program, alas, it currently doesn't communicate with the MS Exchange server. If Thunderbird or Calendar allowed meetings to be scheduled like with Outlook then there would be no reason to use Outlook. Currently this is not the case. Until that time comes this missing functionality is provided Outlook will remain as the default corporate email/scheduling application. I scrolled down to read the rest of this article and it's surprising how much "lite/crippleware" he recommends that has unrestricted paid versions - not a great set of "free" software then. Even the ones he picks are a bit dubious - "TextShield Fusion" (why not OpenOffice Writer?), "602PC Suite 4.0" (surely OpenOffice.org instead?), "Belarc Advisor and #1-TuffTest-Life" (both easily beaten by Sisoft Sandra Standard Edition) and "MusicMatch Jukebox 8.2" (why not Winamp [and I'm sure there are many other free ones, not to mention Real One Player Basic or even WIndows Media Player 9])? #10 Re: Not impressed with the rest of the article thoby ydnar Wednesday February 18th, 2004 7:53 AM The best media player I've found for Win32 is Media Player Classic. It supports pretty much every audio & video format including CD and DVDs, with excellent subtitling, AND it's GPL. http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ #16 Re: Re: Not impressed with the rest of the articleby neilparks1 Wednesday February 18th, 2004 12:38 PM Better yet, get Real Alternative 1.20 and Quicktime Alternative 1.30. Both freeware packages include MPC. #15 Re: Not impressed with the rest of the article thoby neilparks1 Wednesday February 18th, 2004 12:36 PM As a substitute for MS Word, 602PC Suite isn't sensational, but it's not half bad. It's a lot smaller than Open Office. #17 Re: Not impressed with the rest of the article thoby neilparks1 Wednesday February 18th, 2004 12:39 PM As a substitute for MS Word, 602PC Suite isn't sensational, but it's not half bad. It's a lot smaller than Open Office. #19 Re: Not impressed with the rest of the article thoby Waldo_2 Wednesday February 18th, 2004 2:03 PM I have to agree with them on NoteTab: it's really an awesome program, and the scripting abilities in the free version are suprisingly complex. (Granted, I haven't written any such scripts, but the variety of different tasks offered in only the default libraries (clipbooks?) is amazing! I've also taken a quick look at the clipbook (?) programming interface stuff, too.) |