Hoowah! New versions of Firefox (Preview Release 1.0) and Thunderbird (0.8) have been released by the Mozilla Foundation. This is a happy day.
Firefox Improvements
Live Bookmarks - Integration of RSS feeds in the bookmark folder. Not sure if I’ll use this one, as I really like Sharpreader, my new aggregator, but I could see it being very useful for people who don’t have/want a separate news aggregator.
Improved Find - “The Find toolbar (which shows at the bottom of the browser window) automatically highlights text in the page as you type and has a useful highlight feature.”
Improved Security & Block of Popups - ‘Nuff said
Bookmark Improvements - This has been one of the few weak areas of the program (well until you grab some handy extensions), so I look forward to seeing the changes.
Stronger Security for Password Manager - While I don’t use this feature, it is good to see they are adding more protection for those who do.
Note: I recommend that you make a note, of every extension you have installed for Firefox, as “all of your extensions will be disabled when you move to PR. If you were using 0.9, when you first run PR, Firefox will try and connect to update.mozilla.org to look for newer, compatible versions of your Extensions, and if they are available it will download and install them. If you were using 0.8, you will have to find newer compatible versions yourself.”
Thunderbird Improvements
Global Inbox - Combine all of your POP e-mail accounts into a single inbox.
Easier to Switch to Thunderbird - They have improved the migration of e-mail, addresses and preferences from the major e-mail clients.
RSS Integration - Deja vu… Well, it could be interesting to see how they have implemented it within Thunderbird. It seems like every program created these days wants to act as a news aggregator in addition to its main role.
Improved Privacy/Security - Always a good thing to see.
Note: If you are upgrading Thunderbird, pay attention to their install warning.
I upgraded to Firefox 1.0PR and it promptly broke. Apparently it wasn’t all that swift at detecting the incompatible extensions (from the previous version). I ended up having to delete all my extensions then manually reinstalling them one at a time (restarting Firefox between extensions) to make sure I wouldn’t break it again. Ah well. At least I had followed your advice and written down all my extensions first. I ended up with about half of what I had before, plus 7 or 8 new extensions. I love Firefox!
I’ve been using Eudora for years and even upgraded to paid status earlier this year. I tried the mail feature in Mozille Firebird and it didn’t work with the multitude of email addresses that I had. But, that was quite a while ago. So I figured I’d give Thunderbird a shot. I’m importing everything now. Wish me luck. :)
Ouch. I’m sorry to hear about the extensions problem. I haven’t upgraded my browser yet as I want to have enough time to fix any issues that crop up. I will most likely try it tonight. It is good to hear that you kept track of the ones you had, it makes it much easier! And it is always fun to find new ones.
I used to be a die-hard Eudora user as well, always keeping up with the paid upgrades (one of a very few Net programs that I felt were worth it), but eventually the product seemed to stagnate. Thunderbird, like Firefox, has that drive to improve, providing a wealth of solid built-in tools like the junk filters as well as the ability to add extensions.
Let me know if you run into any issues with either of them. I’ll do what I can to help. :D
Oh, the extension problem didn’t really surprise me. The last time I upgraded Firefox, I promptly reinstalled all extensions in one go and couldn’t get the browser to run. Took a bit of searching their forums before I found out where I needed to go to manually delete the corrupt extension file. Thankfully, I remembered for this incident and reinstalling the extensions wasn’t that bad. I’ll look at the Linkzilla one too. That sounds pretty nifty.
I really liked Eudora. Almost immediately after paying for it though, a plugin I had for it broke and the whole program became corrupted. Reinstalling didn’t fix the problem. I had to go back and forth with their tech support and only got a partial solution, and that was with waiting a full day between responses from them. The ’solution’ I got only removed all the preferences I had set and didn’t fix the problem at all. I finally stumbled across the offending file and fixed the issue by manually deleting it. I was so mad about that. And Eudora consistantly ignores some of my spam filters, insisting on putting mail for bad addresses in my Inbox instead of just deleting it.
And yeah, since then, I’ve been less than thrilled with Eudora.
I spent a while last night importing my accounts and mail into Thunderbird, then figuring out how to turn on the global inbox and how to change passwords. I’ll have to reserve judgment until I’ve used it a bit longer and trained the jumk mail filters, but the recommendation from you was good impetus to attempt the switch.