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Try OptimizeGoogle (based on CustomizeGoogle). It has a great number of features, such as anonymizing your Google Cookie UID, blocking ads, removing click tracking, stopping cookies being sent to Google Analytics etc.

The fact is, you have no real way of knowing where any given search engine may be following you.

You two make good points, so might be interested in this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609

I trust Google with my info more than I trust Microsoft. At least Google requires a court order to give out my info.

it would be nice if the browser could somehow implement anonymizing techniques independent of the specific search engine

Like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275 ?

It's not the perfect solution because of the speed, but...

One thing I would surely like to see in email clients however - the gmail like threaded conversation view. It's just so much better and nicer to use, but still many email applications tend to have the plain-list-of-messages view.

Have you voted and commented on the relevant bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241197

It's triple licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. I don't know which license it is that lets Postbox fork it without giving back their changes, but I'd guess that it's not the GPL. See http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/ for more info.

The big question right now is whether or not I risk using a x.0 version release. Maybe I'll let others be the guinea pigs for right now.

I ran the TB 3 betas for most of '09. Beta 2 and 3 were prone to crashing every now and then (2 more then 3). Beta 4 introduced a whole can of new worms, but stopped crashing. RC2 has been pretty stable for the last 2 weeks.

So, if you're an IMAP user (all email is kept on the server), it's not terribly risky, except maybe for the chance of losing your address book. Which is something I've never seen happen. I only mention it because it's not stored on the IMAP server and you have to do local backups to keep it safe.

All that being said, they were already building 3.0.1 nightlies as of 2 weeks ago (around the time that they released the 3rd build for RC1). So it probably won't be too terribly long before you see 3.0.1 released.

There's also already a 3.1 set of nightlies (started about 2 months ago). So that's already in the pipe as well.

Nightly builds

comm-central-trunk - looks like the 3.1 branch
comm-1.9.1 - now the 3.0.1 branch (was the 3.0)
mozilla1.8 - this is the old legacy v2 product

Why not try this Firefox extension: RefControl. You can set it to block the referer (equivalent to copying & pasting the URL) or, even better, set it to the URL you're visiting, which gets around attempts to block direct links. This is, as one of the commenters put it, "One of the essential addons for Firefox. "

The updates are not reviewed anyway. I can update my extension whenever I want with no checking.

What has been working for me (no guarantees about the future!) is to use this exact path (for win32):

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/win32-xpi/

Note the "latest-comm-1.9.1". If I use nightly/win32-xpi/ instead --- that's what seem like it *should* work --- the extension doesn't work. Go figure. All of this may change, I am not sure what the differences are in the different locations.

I know that this works because I just installed the release version of 3.0 and Lightning on my wife's laptop.

I am disappointed that the Lightning folks have made it so hard to find an extension that works with 3.0. This seems *very* important.

TB2 (really, the Courier IMAP daemon and Maildir structure, where each email is a separate file) handles my 4.2GB pretty well. Note, though, that I'm pretty rigorous about creating a new dated folder and updating the filter rules at the start of each calendar quarter, Thus, no folder has more than 10-12K messages.

What a process and something that there is no need for. Just keep pushing them into the same folders. If you need to, setup a set of filters to do a backup once a month instead of having to create new dated folders; or just follows Mozilla's recommended backup method, which is similar to the following:

1. close Thunderbird
2. locate your profile folder
3. copy the folder to a backup location
4. open Thunderbird
5. delete messages older than you want

Only difference is they have you rebuild your entire profile, which could be quite cumbersome if you have a lot of folders.

How Thunderbird has gotten this far without integrated calendaring (not just via plugin) I have no idea.

Maybe someone can explain but I just don't get this idea. Why is the current setup so bad? It seems to me that Mozilla's got the best of everything.

Want your calendar integrated with your mail client? Awesome, download the plugin.
Want the same great calendar but don't use Thunderbird? Great, download it here now.
Didn't want a calendar cause you already like yours? That's cool too, our email client doesn't force you to waste resources by loading a calendar you won't use.

I personally use the third option and do all my calendaring from my phone, but I can see that many people do a lot of scheduling via email and the first option works well, or that people just like the calendar but for whatever reason don't like/can't use Thunderbird so option two is better.

Making it mandatory just seems like bloat.

How Thunderbird has gotten this far without integrated calendaring (not just via plugin) I have no idea.

Maybe someone can explain but I just don't get this idea. Why is the current setup so bad? It seems to me that Mozilla's got the best of everything.

Want your calendar integrated with your mail client? Awesome, download the plugin.
Want the same great calendar but don't use Thunderbird? Great, download it here now.
Didn't want a calendar cause you already like yours? That's cool too, our email client doesn't force you to waste resources by loading a calendar you won't use.

I personally use the third option and do all my calendaring from my phone, but I can see that many people do a lot of scheduling via email and the first option works well, or that people just like the calendar but for whatever reason don't like/can't use Thunderbird so option two is better.

Making it mandatory just seems like bloat.

The idea of using computers/software is that they must work for me, I do not need to work for them, I do not need to move things manually to see things how a user want it to be (reasonable ideas I mean)

The best advice on this thread has been to use the Copy Sent to Current Add-on

You could try the Copy Sent to Current Add-on for Thunderbird.

I can't find any info on recent Lightning work (aside from the fact that the nightlies are still being pumped out) ... the developer blog is offline (is mozillazine dead? their front page last speaks from June 2009...), and the Mozilla Calendar development roadmap was last updated about year ago.

Nevertheless, the roadmap's stated plan is to release Lightning 1.0 shortly after Thunderbird 3.0 ... no idea if that's still on track. If I recall correctly, the calendaring portion was so side-tracked that they removed it from TB3 altogether, also shunting all(?) Mozilla-(corporate)-sponsored time away from it. OpenOffice.org is actually the bigger pushing body for TB3 as an MS Outlook killer (which means a calendar is desired), but Oracle's purchase of Sun may have rearranged (or deferred) priorities.

When TB gets native calendaring, I'll push hard on migration from Outlook for my corporation. If Lightning becomes as stable and ready as Enigmail (which is to say that politics are the only barring element from inclusion), I may make that push anyway ... but a streamlined integration is essential in the long run, and resistance to that makes me balk.

I can't find any info on recent Lightning work (aside from the fact that the nightlies are still being pumped out) ... the developer blog is offline (is mozillazine dead? their front page last speaks from June 2009...), and the Mozilla Calendar development roadmap was last updated about year ago.

Nevertheless, the roadmap's stated plan is to release Lightning 1.0 shortly after Thunderbird 3.0 ... no idea if that's still on track. If I recall correctly, the calendaring portion was so side-tracked that they removed it from TB3 altogether, also shunting all(?) Mozilla-(corporate)-sponsored time away from it. OpenOffice.org is actually the bigger pushing body for TB3 as an MS Outlook killer (which means a calendar is desired), but Oracle's purchase of Sun may have rearranged (or deferred) priorities.

When TB gets native calendaring, I'll push hard on migration from Outlook for my corporation. If Lightning becomes as stable and ready as Enigmail (which is to say that politics are the only barring element from inclusion), I may make that push anyway ... but a streamlined integration is essential in the long run, and resistance to that makes me balk.

Lightning isn't ready yet, it's 1.0 release is lagging behind TB 3.0. You can use the current nightly builds and they should work with Thunderbird 3. They're marked as Lightning 1.0B1pre. You can grab a nightly here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html#nightly

They said they're basically at 1.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate status and hope to have the official 1.0 Beta 1 release out within a couple weeks, at least according to the Mozilla Calendar blog. Details are in the Mozilla Calendar Blog (currently offline):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/

We're going to stick with recommending Thunderbird 2.0 for a little bit on PortableApps.com because Lightning isn't ready, and it is (arguably) the most important Thunderbird extension. And recommending nightlies to regular users is a bad idea.

Thunderbird was good, but lacked polish.

Does not!

Yeah, I dug around online for solutions and had this working in 2.0 reasonably well using mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new.

I posted this question on mozillazine a few weeks ago and got some more information, including the bugs listed in bugzilla which are still unresolved. I probably should have included those before.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1615305
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496119
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528009

Yeah, I dug around online for solutions and had this working in 2.0 reasonably well using mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new.

I posted this question on mozillazine a few weeks ago and got some more information, including the bugs listed in bugzilla which are still unresolved. I probably should have included those before.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1615305
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496119
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528009

You should try one of these:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/

I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.

Mod parent up. The Lightning calendar plugin team has been craking out bug fixes and is well on its way to releasing.

How Thunderbird has gotten this far without integrated calendaring (not just via plugin) I have no idea.

You should try one of these:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/

I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.

I had the same problem when installing the RC version. This add-on turns out to be very helpful while they don't manage to update lightning.

The problem I have now is with the update feature. Having installed RC2, do I need to download de full version? It doesn't seem to be able to update itself.

What would Google think if someone released their customer list?

We have it. A sample of Google AdWords advertisers:

• saarc.autodesk.com
• safeguarddd.com
• safestepproducts.com
• safetyawarenessposters.com
• safetyproductsllc.com
• safetyrailsource.com
• sagemas.com
• sagepayservices.com
• sagonet.com
• saideigama.com

There are about 22,000 Google AdWords customers known to us. Every time Google puts up an AdWords ad, it exposes the identity of the advertiser. Our AdRater browser plug-in rates on-line advertisers as their ads are presented to users. Unlike most plug-ins, we don't monitor user behavior. Instead, we monitor advertiser behavior, which is in some ways more interesting. This doesn't violate Google's terms of service. Every request made of Google was made by a user, not us, during ordinary browsing. We're just watching the ads go by. It's like clipping ads from newspapers to see what your competitors are doing.

As we point out occasionally, about 35% of Google's advertisers are "bottom feeders". Google needs to raise the bar on who can run ads with them. Search Google for "Craigslist auto posting tool" and look at the paid ads. You can buy "Easy Ad Poster Deluxe", a program for spamming Craigslist, through Google Checkout, so Google isn't just advertising it, they're taking a cut of the revenue as well. That's embarrassing for Google, or should be.

Same here.

RefControl takes care of that nicely, though.

Set the referer for experts-exchange.com to forge “http://www.google.com/”. Then set these filters for AdBlock Plus:

experts-exchange.com#div(blurredAnswer)
experts-exchange.com#div(relatedSolutionsContainer)
experts-exchange.com#div(sectionFour)
experts-exchange.com#div(startFreeTrialEcho)

It’s like magic!

Sample page to test your filters. You’ll be impressed (I was).

The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.

Perhaps not *quite* what you want, but try Tree Style Tabs.
I find them incredibly useful, especially when browsing slashdot.

My humble suggestion of Fx privacy-enforcement add-ons:
 
TACO, Optimize Google, Better Privacy + delete cookies when closing Firefox + use scroogle or similar.
 
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11073
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498
  https://eu.ixquick.com/eng/
  https://ssl.scroogle.org/
 
Tinfoil hat - optional.

My humble suggestion of Fx privacy-enforcement add-ons:
 
TACO, Optimize Google, Better Privacy + delete cookies when closing Firefox + use scroogle or similar.
 
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11073
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498
  https://eu.ixquick.com/eng/
  https://ssl.scroogle.org/
 
Tinfoil hat - optional.

My humble suggestion of Fx privacy-enforcement add-ons:
 
TACO, Optimize Google, Better Privacy + delete cookies when closing Firefox + use scroogle or similar.
 
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11073
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498
  https://eu.ixquick.com/eng/
  https://ssl.scroogle.org/
 
Tinfoil hat - optional.

I don't accept cookies I don't know I want, and I don't run scripts I don't know I need to run. It's not that big of a hassle. Firefox's addons, cookiesafe (let's you decide what cookies you accept), noscript (we all should know about that), and BetterPrivacy (blocks lso cookies), will protect your privacy, and your computer from exploits. I'm all for surfing the web default-deny. There is no reason every website I visit should be able to run whatever scripts they want and tag my computer with cookies. And it gets rid of 90% of adds too, as a fringe benefit.

I don't accept cookies I don't know I want, and I don't run scripts I don't know I need to run. It's not that big of a hassle. Firefox's addons, cookiesafe (let's you decide what cookies you accept), noscript (we all should know about that), and BetterPrivacy (blocks lso cookies), will protect your privacy, and your computer from exploits. I'm all for surfing the web default-deny. There is no reason every website I visit should be able to run whatever scripts they want and tag my computer with cookies. And it gets rid of 90% of adds too, as a fringe benefit.

I don't accept cookies I don't know I want, and I don't run scripts I don't know I need to run. It's not that big of a hassle. Firefox's addons, cookiesafe (let's you decide what cookies you accept), noscript (we all should know about that), and BetterPrivacy (blocks lso cookies), will protect your privacy, and your computer from exploits. I'm all for surfing the web default-deny. There is no reason every website I visit should be able to run whatever scripts they want and tag my computer with cookies. And it gets rid of 90% of adds too, as a fringe benefit.

Coockie Culler?

I like this relatively new cookie control mechanism. It is simple but effective.

selectivecookiedelete; https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11044

CookieCuller might also be appropriate:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/82

Every website you visit that stores a cookie is tracking your browsing habits on its site, until you delete that cookie. What Google's doing is just the same.

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048

To disable the tracking, you just delete the cookie. Set Firefox to delete cookies on exit or startup, or disallow that site's cookie and you're golden. This 'feature' from google is no different.

Just rememeber to obliterate those evil, sneaky Flash cookies too: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623

I prefer using Optimize Google (which is based on Customize Google, but that one is no longer maintained). Optimize Google enhances Google search results, but also allows you to make Google cookie UID anonymous, plus allows you to stop all cookies being sent to Google Analytics. You can also remove Google Ads, and Google click tracking. There are other options available for most other Google tools, too e.g. GMail, Calendar, Maps, Docs etc.

I prefer using Optimize Google (which is based on Customize Google, but that one is no longer maintained). Optimize Google enhances Google search results, but also allows you to make Google cookie UID anonymous, plus allows you to stop all cookies being sent to Google Analytics. You can also remove Google Ads, and Google click tracking. There are other options available for most other Google tools, too e.g. GMail, Calendar, Maps, Docs etc.

I just created and submitted a Search Plugin for Google dictionary, but it's probably going to stay in the Mozilla Add-on sandbox until it gets a few reviews. I don't know if you need to be logged on to the add-on web site ( http://addons.mozilla.org/ ) to see it, review it or use it. Enjoy!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953 ;)

I've tried my many attempts at a MythTV HTPC setup and it truly is a lot of work and time. What really got me every time is exactly what the author stated: the many handful hack attempts to get everything to work right. I ended up sufficing back to using my useset + newzbin + hellanzb + hellavcr setup. For mainstream TV recording, it's *always* on Usenet somewhere with-in 40 minutes after showing and the whole point of a DVR is to watch your recorded shows after the fact. Then set up a Samba share (for WIndows) or NFS or use your samba share for your Linux hosts, lock it down and use `mplayer`'s "-cache" parameter and you're golden. I'm on my laptop much of the time anyway, so sitting in bed watching a show becomes pretty effort-less streaming it over the network or hooking my laptop to my LCD dvd (that has VGA-in port). If I want to watch DVDs, I either use `mplayer` again over the network or just burn the dang DVD image, because again... Useset is also useful for that and my newzbin indexing report service + hellafox makes it even easier.

Debugging JS with an alert window is a horrible experience.

Which is why you use a Javascript Debugger. Even if you're developing some IE specific abomination, Microsoft has the tools you need.

If you use Firefox, have a look at this addon.

It's what they did with Rhino.

Inability to perform CPU-intensive computations due to these dynamic types of yours

The dynamic types really don't slow it down that much, and it depends on your implementation. Google's V8 does well enough to run an NES Emulator at comfortable speeds.

lack of threading or any other explicit or implicit parallelism support

Parallel execution is actually pretty easy in a browser context using setTimeout and setInterval, though synchronization is a bit of an issue. But if you really want threads, hop on Rhino and pull from Java.

no library facilities to modern 2D/3D graphics libraries

In the context of a browser, Canvas actually gives you a lot. But outside of that, Rhino gives you everything Java's got.

I liked what Mozilla guys did in JS1.7, where they've added a new construct:

let (x = 1) {
  let (x = 2) {
    write(x); // 2
  }
  write(x); // 1
}
write(x); // undefined

I actually like this more than traditional C/C++ syntax inherited by Java and the likes, since it makes the scope of every variable an explicit block (rather than from implicit range point of declaration to the end of the enclosing block). Better yet, they've added let-expression too, which is something I sorely miss in imperative languages since first trying OCaml and seeing "let ... in ..." construct.

The problem is that this isn't standard EcmaScript, and is not understood by other browsers. ES4 was supposed to have it, but ES4 is dead.

It gets faster by implementing threads.

You're confusing a variety of unrelated things here. Javascript works fine in every browser that implements standards accordingly (that is, every browser with the exception of IE 6, 7 and 8). The language is not only consistent across browser, it's actually implementing some really interesting features such as list comprehension, generators, and block scoping.

And I don't know where you get the idea that debugging Javascript is any more difficult than any other scripting language. You can't claim to be a professional JS dev and not have heard of some tools.

Oh, and as a scripting language, it is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages available, in the same league as SmallTalk and Lua. The fact that Palm developers obviously used the wrong tool for the wrong job does not in any way detract from the qualities of the language.

Methinks there's a lot of people that talk crap about Javascript but have never bothered to get the proper documentation and tools. Newsflash for everyone: anyone who does professional Python and Ruby development uses debuggers and text editors specifically for that job. Just because JS runs on the browser doesn't mean it doesn't need the same level of attention.

You're confusing a variety of unrelated things here. Javascript works fine in every browser that implements standards accordingly (that is, every browser with the exception of IE 6, 7 and 8). The language is not only consistent across browser, it's actually implementing some really interesting features such as list comprehension, generators, and block scoping.

And I don't know where you get the idea that debugging Javascript is any more difficult than any other scripting language. You can't claim to be a professional JS dev and not have heard of some tools.

Oh, and as a scripting language, it is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages available, in the same league as SmallTalk and Lua. The fact that Palm developers obviously used the wrong tool for the wrong job does not in any way detract from the qualities of the language.

Methinks there's a lot of people that talk crap about Javascript but have never bothered to get the proper documentation and tools. Newsflash for everyone: anyone who does professional Python and Ruby development uses debuggers and text editors specifically for that job. Just because JS runs on the browser doesn't mean it doesn't need the same level of attention.

You're confusing a variety of unrelated things here. Javascript works fine in every browser that implements standards accordingly (that is, every browser with the exception of IE 6, 7 and 8). The language is not only consistent across browser, it's actually implementing some really interesting features such as list comprehension, generators, and block scoping.

And I don't know where you get the idea that debugging Javascript is any more difficult than any other scripting language. You can't claim to be a professional JS dev and not have heard of some tools.

Oh, and as a scripting language, it is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages available, in the same league as SmallTalk and Lua. The fact that Palm developers obviously used the wrong tool for the wrong job does not in any way detract from the qualities of the language.

Methinks there's a lot of people that talk crap about Javascript but have never bothered to get the proper documentation and tools. Newsflash for everyone: anyone who does professional Python and Ruby development uses debuggers and text editors specifically for that job. Just because JS runs on the browser doesn't mean it doesn't need the same level of attention.