I don’t personally use Thunderbird or Firefox as my main email or web browsing tools. I do have Firefox on my kids windows box, and I dole it out to anyone who’ll let me. I’ve hooked a few people at work up with Thunderbird, but even my wife uses Evolution.
This last week, Firefox 1.0pr1 came out, as well as Thunderbird 0.8, and quite a few little tweaks and additions have taken place.
I upgraded Firefox on my windows desktop, and I noticed several things. One is that during the install, it said “You have an extention (Sage) that is not compatable with this version of Firefox, would you like to check for an upgrade?”. I said yes, it checked, found the upgrade, and installed if for me, no restart required. That ROCKS. Sage is an RSS reader BTW.
Another thing I noticed about Firefox is that in a menu it told me how many email messages I had. I’d forgotten that I had an old copy of Thunderbird on there, and it could tell, without me even running Thunderbird, how many new email messages were in there. That’s cool.
The last thing I noticed is that if there’s a LINK tag in the HTML head area that links to an RSS feed, it puts an icon in the status bar. When I clicked it, it pulled it right into Sage. I suspect if I hadn’t had Sage, it would have pulled it into Thunderbird, which brings me to my next point.
Thunderbird now does two cool new things. One is to read RSS feeds. You create an “account”, as if it were a new email box. But you check RSS, and then you can collect RSS feeds in there. Then the articles look like email messages, and you can choose whether to load the description (handy for comics) or the web page for the post in the email reading area.
I noticed that you can set the refresh times per account, so you can set one account for daily feeds, like MNN that refreshes in the morning, and then create another that refreshes every 30 minutes or something for feeds like Google news, and Ed’s blog.
Another cool thing is that you can have multiple pop/imap accounts set up, and pool all the emails into one inbox, while still maintaining roles. On the one hand, it’s handy to see everything together. On the other hand, it might be cool to keep the emails apart so you keeps your trains of thought on their own tracks.
Either way, my wife uses Thunderbird now, and I use it as my rss reader for now. I’ll still use Galeon as my main browser though.
one of the thing i noticed right away (while checking my webmail) was that the address bar turns a dull yellow when in a secure site. in the older versions there was just a little lock on the bottom left which wasn’t very obvious. now, however, it is quite obvious (but not distracting) when you are on a secure site.
I am a Firefox man, myself. Have you looked at the Mac versions? I am currently having a bit of trouble with Camino.
I assume that this is Topher of gospelcom fame? I note the link to Joel.
tmatt “seemed like a nice guy” mattingly
Terry, I tend to bounce back and forth between Safari and Firefox. I want to like Camino but the current version has a silly bug where it adds two copies of a bookmark when you drag a bookmark to the toolbar, and that bug has been there for months and months — development on Camino seems so terribly slow it’s a disappointment. I love the fact that Camino behaves more like a “real” OS X app than Firefox, but little annoyances plague me and it seems like they never get fixed, so I always head back to Firefox or Safari after trying it.