OT: Re: browsers

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Emery Snyder wrote:

> Mozilla is a stripped-down version of Netscape. Firebird is a lighter
> version of mozilla. I find it very useful, even better than Opera --
> and the new version 0.7 just got released yesterday. So did version 0.2
> of thunderbird, the mozilla project's email app.

I like most of what I've seen of Mozilla, as a worthy continuation of
Netscape. It loads pages much faster than NS, including many that NS can no
longer load, because it's just out of date. Right now, I still prefer the
integrated suite approach. At some point in the not too distant future, the
two "birds" will be fully linkable, which can add up to more of a
transparent replacement for the suite, although at that point you will be
updating the modular sections periodically (more of a hassle, in my view)
and you won't have Composer -- if anyone will actually miss that. The
Mozilla suite design stops at version 1.5x, I believe, so it's going to be
'go modular or nothing.'

> Both are small and
> open-source, therefore extensible (with lots of extensions), and free.
> Both are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

And OS/2.

> The firebird browser has a built-in pop-up blocker, and you can right
> click on any advertisement graphic to block images from that server.
> There's an extension for firebird to replace all Flash objects on web
> pages with a button you have to press before it plays -- great for
> getting rid of those annoying Flash ads.

Sounds good to me. Exploiter won't even let you turn OFF Javascript (!), or
did they change that after version 5 ?

> Thunderbird has built-in Bayesian filtering for spam. Also has the
> usual support for different address book formats (imports), multiple
> accounts, filtering, etc. -- a full replacement for Outlook.

Being able to access multiple "Profiles" (switch between different Mail
accounts), without having to quit the program and reload it, was the big
initial selling point for me.

Jordan