First post, by HunterZ
- Rank
- l33t++
I've been using Mozilla Suite for quite some time now, but now that the writing is on the wall as far as which pacikages are going to be updated from now on, I've decided to make the leap to Firefox and Thunderbird. I never used any of the other components of the Mozilla Suite, so it was really just style changes that made me hesitant. The biggest one was Firefox's infamous download manager thing, which I managed to beat into behaving in a fashion I can live with.
I also found myself immediately downloading the following:
- Pinball Modern theme, because the default theme is crappy
- Flashblock, because I hate waiting for flash ads to load in order for me to be able to view a web page
- Single Window (tabbed browsing extension), because I hate when I click a link and it opens in a whole new window instead of a new tab. I like having only one browser window open with lots of tabs - it keeps my Windows task bar from getting cluttered, among other things.
I've heard that there is a Firefox tweak utility available that I might look into next.
Thunderbird, on the other hand, is quite nice. It seems to be more polished and less quirky than Mozilla Mail & News. In addition, it has built-in RSS support, so I don't have to fight with Forumzilla's quirks any more. It's kind of cool having my Comcast ISP POP3 email account, several RSS feeds, and the SDL newsgroup all accessible in one program with a consistent interface.
Unfortunately, it does seem that the overhead of running two separate programs is significant, as Firefox and Thunderbird have a larger combined memory footprint than Mozilla with a Browser and Mail & News window open at the same time. A difference of 20 megabytes really isn't significant when I have a gig of RAM though, so I can't really complain.
I need to get a theme for Thunderbird. I remember reading something about a version of Pinball for it, but I don't know if it's been released yet or not.