-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I am more and more impressed with how the Mozilla project is working out. I was skeptical after a couple years of having the Netscape source out in the open with no real results but now I see it was definitely worth the wait.
Firefox is a great browser and Thunderbird is turning out to be the best GUI email program I have ever used. I know it is the best because I am still using it after a month. All of the others I gave up on in just a couple of days. I do still somewhat miss the speed with which I could navigate mutt and apply regular expressions to many emails and move them to other folders etc. and still occasionally use mutt for something but only once every couple of weeks now. But Thunderbird does have some pretty nice advantages also. IMAP support is easier to use and configure than it ever was under mutt. The ability to easily deal with attachments by having them automatically open in OO.org or whatever without having to fuss with the mutt's mimetype configs is nice also. I am having to open a lot of attachments lately as I look at resumes, powerpoint (ugh...I will rant on this later you can be sure) etc. I also like the very easy way in which it handles encryption and signing via the Enigmail extension. Nothing special to know or do. But the really the biggest grip about any GUI program involving text editing: No vi or emacs support in the text editor! I am so sick of using stupid textarea text editors provided default with the apps! How hard could it really be to encapsulate vim or emacs in the text widget?! For a browser/email program written by real hackers it sure sucks at editing! Everyone knows how well Firefox has turned out as a web browser and why it is so handy. But let me mention an unexpected side effect: Extensions. The Mozilla people provided a very extensible API to make Firefox extensible in some very interesting ways. I am amazed with how flexible and well integrated the extensions are. I am beginning to understand what people have been talking about when they speak of Mozilla as an application platform. My favorite extensions: Enigmail - Actually a Thunderbird extension which is technically part of the Mozilla platform also. Automatically manages my keyring, verifies digital signatures, signs all of my outgoing mail, etc. Mnenhy - Another Thunderbird plugin that allows you to hack custom header displays. I have added list-id to the header fields displayed so I can click on it and automatically turn it into a message filter to filter my mailing lists. I am torn whether to go full on into Thunderbird filters because they are so easy to set up or stick with the procmail filters I have used for years. Mnenhy also provides junk filter statistics (if you use the built in bayes, which I don't because I use spamass) and misc. other features. Bookmarks synchronizer - Webdav up your bookmarks file when you close your Firefox session and syncs bookmarks between different browsers. Webdav is great for this sort of thing. We are also using webdav as a general file store here in the office. This won't work with Zope's webdav though because it doesn't support the auth method zope is using. Google pagerank - Not so useful, just kinda neat. Displays the pagerank of the page you are currently looking at in the bottom right hand corner of the browser. Greasemonkey - Total control over the html content your browser downloads. Finally! I have just installed this one and started playing with it. It will apply a custom script to a website to change css, change html, add/remove elements, etc. Handy for making a website work or display the way you wish it did. This one was features on /. and there was quite a bit of discussion on the potential problems this sort of end-user editing of websites could cause. But I firmly believe I should be able to hack my web browser to display the content however I want. Any problems caused by such editing are strictly the end users fault. Platypus - A sort of real-time WYSIWYG editor add-on that requires Greasemonkey. Activate the platypus extension, hit a command key, and watch the changes. You can delete page elements, re-insert them in the same place or different, change html, change css attributes etc. Pretty handy for quickly editing pages with annoying "features". You can then press s and the changes are saved as a Greasemonkey script so it can always be automatically applied to the page. See also the Aardvark extension. Web developer extension - View and edit CSS, validate HTML/CSS, examine the DOM, many others. Pretty cool stuff. But this is all pretty simple as far as applications go. I need to take another look at XUL and the other Mozilla technologies to see how much potential Mozilla itself has as an application platform. I think I may have even seen a book on this - -- Tracy R Reed http://ultraviolet.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCjNBH9PIYKZYVAq0RAgS2AJ9O90uykyivT5vm0MQzqcxhi9yPWQCeMaC5 z96BlhU/AHpi+Sr1XLQojVc= =v6un -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
