Mozilla Firefox Convert Robin Bloor Switches to Mozilla ThunderbirdWednesday April 21st, 2004Robin Bloor was so overwhelmed by the response he received to his recent article about Mozilla Firefox that he has written a further column about the Mozilla project. As well as promising to try tabbed browsing, Bloor also announces that he has switched to Mozilla Thunderbird and gives a brief (but not always accurate) history of the open source project. What's he switched Mozilla Thunderbird to? Not to Outlook express surely... No, he switched it! As in, switch v. switched, switch·ing, switch·es v. tr. 1. Chiefly Southern U.S. To whip with or as if with a switch, especially in punishing a child. Given that that I seem to remember so many writers botching the history (and at times the nature) of Mozilla, why not create a history page under the "About Mozilla" page on mozilla.org? The Wikipedia has a pretty complete history of Mozilla. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla> That's not the point. There should either be a link to that page in the about page or just rewritten for the about page. 'Common' folk aren't going to go look at wikipedia to get their history. They may look at the Mozilla site and that's about it. We should make the information more accessible If you want a neat email client and don't mind having all emails you compose being sent as plain text, Opera's mail client is delicious. Threading of mail messages, database views, virtual folders, etc.....very nice. You can download from the top-most sticky thread here on 4-22-04 for the latest Beta of version 7.50 of Opera....great stuff that does beat Mozilla/Thunderbird/Firefox in many areas. Yes, it is good for the Mozilla developers to use competetive products so that useful features can be brought into Moz ;) Actually all email s/b plain text. HTML email is an abomination. If you are in an artistic mood, post your beautiful creation to the web and send your intended recipient the URL. If Opera will spin off a standalone email client (and make it freeware) I'll gladly try it. I like HTML mail when it makes it easier to read. For example, I think my daily mailing from Slashdot would be much more readable if it used (proper) HTML to mark headings, etc. (Which reminds me to check now and make sure they don't actually have an HTML option, or I'll look stupid saying this!) Yes, image-laden-for-no-reason HTML messages and those where it is used for no point other than apparent attempts at personal expression are questionable, but I think HTML does have acceptable uses in e-mail. And, yes, people should always use plain text unless they know HTML is OK. But I can't quite agree that HTML mail is evil and that nobody should ever send or receive it. Where was the history not accurate? In the earliest days, it was Netscape, not Microsoft, that first polluted HTML with proprietary extensions. On Win 3.1, Netscape Navigator was bloatware, requiring the gosh-awful Win32 extension to the OS. MSIE for Win 3.1 was slim and fast by contrast.
|
|