Firefox is hot; Thunderbird's not — for good reason

St. Louis Post Dispatch ^ | Dec. 17 2004 | David Sheets

[Graybeard58]

Among the online world’s hottest commodities, nothing sizzles quite like Firefox, the new Web browser by the California-based Mozilla Foundation that’s causing sleeplessness in and around Seattle, Microsoft Corp’s home turf.

Since Version 1.0 of Firefox went public about a month ago, about 10 million Internet Explorer users have seen the white-hot light and switched, gnawing off a huge chunk of IE's dominant market share (about 4 percent of it) while easing their security concerns. (This week, Microsoft announced five new security flaws in IE, bringing the total this year to 45 — or about 43 more than many people consider tolerable. And last week, Penn State University implored its 80,000-plus students and faculty to stop using IE purely for security's sake.)

So, it's logical to think the Foundation's flagship e-mail program, Thunderbird, developed almost in lock step with Firefox and now enjoying its own Version 1.0 release, has superstar numbers in its future as well. After all, Thunderbird's believed to be less vulnerable to online threats than Microsoft's popular Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail products — the same reason behind Firefox's star turn over IE.

But that kind of thinking may only give you headaches.

The Thunderbird-Firefox open-source tandem replaces

[cyborg]

LOL!!!!

[edchambers]

I use outlook express when I remember to check my email now I haven't for about a week and I'm afraid.AVG scans each and every email for viruses but it takes forever and a day to do it.I know I'll start up my other PC and open outlook and forget about it for awhile.Ah the joys of having multiple PCs.

[lancer]

I had problems with Firefox graphics (still do) but most of the problems cleared up when I changed to a new user profile. Try that and see if your colors change the way you want (mine do).

[Graybeard58]

Geez, I wish I understood any of this, IE is where I click to get to FRee Republic, beyond that ????????

IE is your "Browser" and it has a lot of security flaws 45 to date. So far, other browsers don't have the security problems and in the opinion of many people just about any other browser is better that IE....Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox etc.

Go to their web sites and down load one if you want it and then ignore IE.

[edchambers]

803 and counting,I see full auto wholesale deletiing in my futer.

[hole_n_one]

I figured it out.

I had the History preference for remembering web pages visited set at 0 days.

I increased it to 2 days, and now visited FR links change color as expected.

[Space Wrangler]

I LOVE Firefox, but will stick with Outlook since all my contact and calender info is in Outlook and I sync it with my Ipaq PDA. Firefox is the epitome of 'less is more', weighing in at 4.5 MB, whereas the security nightmare known as IE is just south of 25 MB. Firefox also totally eliminates pop-ups 'out of the box'. A much leaner and better working browser to be sure. I've encouraged everyone I know to use it, and even have a copy on my pda and my cruzer USB drive as well so I can just download it right then and there to anyone I reccomend it to. No complaints whatsoever either. Everyone that I have reccomended it to uses it 90%+ as their browser.

[PokeyJoe]

Use Fedora, comes with thunderbird and firefox and open office (all free btw). Put thunderbird on windows - saved old emails from outlook worked like a charm despite what this guy says), passed it over to the Linux box - and wala. Done Deal. Chunked the Windows machine - have a new FreeRepublic reading daemon machine.

[searchandrecovery]

When using firefox, do the links change color for you after you visit them?

First, let me qualify my remarks by saying that I'm not in any way an html or internet expert. At all. But...

1. If I click on a link in fr (like latest articles), then click the back button, the link does change color (light blue to light purple, kinda hard to see).
2. At other sites, different results. Like google home page do the same thing and same color.

In summation - don't know. Don't know why, don't know how.

[nickcarraway]

ping

[Khurkris]

I switched to T-Bird and am very happy with its performance so far. It "learns" your mail preferences and so far, has done a fine job for me.


Of course I use FireFox...and it is excellent.

[semaj]

Don't use Outlook or Outlook Express. Keep the mail (Viruses, SPAM, Spyware, Trojans, etc...) off of your computer completely by utlizing a web-based e-mail service.

[Graybeard58]

by utlizing a web-based e-mail service.

I use ukonline.net it's free and has unlimited storage and graffiti.net 100MBs storage and also free. I don't get spam in either one.

I set up a yahoo email account to register at different online newspapers I read. I don't care how much it gets spammed since I never open anything I get there. I just go to it once in a while and empty everything in it.

Anybody can use my online accounts by clicking my screen name and scroll to the bottom of the page for a list and instructions.

[redcountyrepublican]

Sometimes a website will establish the colors of the links and visited links themselves by code based on the color scheme of their site.

You can set your preferences in Firefox for links and visited links by going to Tools-Options-General-Fonts and colors.

I haven't tried it to see if it will override the sites style sheet or not though

[Sloth]

I use Thunderbird & have had no problems. I didn't like the 'Mozilla suite' as a whole entity, for some reason I've forgotten, but as separate components I use & enjoy both Firefox & Thunderbird.

[sd-joe]

>> "Could it be a cookie issue?"

Could be the chocolate chips

[Dubya-M-Dees]

I've been using both Firefox and Thunderbird for a while now. I LOVE Firefox. The extentions that are available make it very tweakable and feature rich. I haven't had any problems with Thunderbird either. I use it with several POP3 accounts and it works like a champ. Some of my favorite Firefox extentions: Adblock (advanced ad blocker)

Image Zoom (right click and hold on an image and use the scroller to zoom in and out right on the webpage)

Tabbrowser Preferences (adds some nice extras to tabbed browsing like middle clicking a link launches a new tab and sets the focus)

TinyURLCreater (Right click on a webpage and choose "Make tinyURL, and it does so and copies it to your clipboard)

And my number one favorite is - BugMeNot. It a sort of shared account manager for websites that require a registration (like newspaper websites require you to make an account to read an article). When you get to a page that asks for a log in, right click one of the registration boxes and choose "BugMeNot". It will search a central repository to see if there is an account for the site. If it finds one, it will autofill the login field and let you in. If it doesn't find one, it will ask you to go ahead and register an account there and submit it for other users. I haven't found a newspaper type site that it doesn't have an account for yet!!

[El Gran Salseron]

Incredimail is spyware in disguise. :-)

[John Lenin]

The whole internet is based on spyware.

[El Gran Salseron]

"The whole internet is based on spyware."

To each his own.

I have my computer protected against it and get none. :-)