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For email, I have set up Mozilla Thunderbird on my wife's Windows XP box - and she loves it.

It has a very smart spam stopping feature, its easy for her to use (non technical person), and it doesn't have all of the virus problems associated with Outlook.

She used to complain about Outlook all of the time on her old system. Since I put Thunderbird on there, I haven't heard a peep out of her; that is testimony enough in my book...

Well, for Browser or Mail, I highly recommend both Opera or Mozilla. Both will handle Mail and Browsing quite well, and a few other nifty things too.

I have used both, and there are features in both that I like... both are free, although one will display ads (Opera) until you purchase a copy.

I strongly suggest downloading a copy of both, and seeing which one you prefer.

If you want Graphics software for any arty things, try the GIMP, or if you want something a little more painty (ie; emulates real painting and drawing materials) Open Canvas is good. I guess it depends what your needs are when it comes to editing or creating pictures.

I used Mozilla for my web browser at home it suits all of my browsing needs.
Surely if you're only using it for browsing you should use Firebird instead?

It's probably been said already, but Mozilla Firebird

No pop-ups, easily configurable for no ads, no spyware, no ActiveX crap, and it is free.

Here is my top ten list (in no particular order) for Windows. I'll let everyone argue about the Linux tools.
CygWin the Linux-like environment for Windows.
Mozilla naturally.... Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
WS FTP Light a FREE, FTP client that works great.
PuTTY a free SSH client for Windows.
VNC remote controll software, NOTE: the location is no longer on the ATT Labs UK site.
GNU-EMacs for Windows. I usually install it, but use Vi more.
Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler. I use VC++ 6.0, but this is free, and I think it's pretty good.
NetHack You MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
Free-AV free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
Boingo to see where the closest hotspot is. (free) you don't need the service.

I've been using Mozilla firebird for my main browser and it's been really solid.

I also use Mozilla thunderbird for my email, and have been really happy with it.

You can get them from mozilla.org

Well, heck! If your keyboard has all those keys on it, why not use 'em for something?

For all you other card-carrying keyboard shortcut phanatics out there, here are some more things to do with that logo key. Microsoft actually has an entire KB article on, well, KB shortcuts. Also, here is a list for Mozilla users.

Here is a patch that will stop all those ActiveX warnings.

Get an SVG enabled Mozilla build and start playing with it. It's fun.

See this pressrelease for more information.

Your points still don't prove anything.

It exists, but not yet in the mainline code. See here.

At the risk of slashdotting my own site.....

If you are having trouble accessing Google and other major search engines, there is a NASTY browser hijacker going around using a bad HOSTS file to redirect the IP. We finally have the bugger figured out and here are instructions on dealing with the problem:

http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index.php?showtopic= 12127

Look for your HOSTS file and open it in a text editor. There is no extension on this file. It is only HOSTS.

Win 9x/ME: C:\windows\HOSTS
Win NT/2000: C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS
Win XP: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS

Note that on some systems the hijacker has hacked the registry to point to a bad HOSTS file at C:\Windows\help\HOSTS. Look in this location as well as those above.

If any line is found that mentions google or other search engines, delete the entire file. That should fix the hijack. To prevent it from happening again, apply all relevent security patches.

For 100% protection from this sort of attack, lock Internet Explorer behind a firewall and use a real browser. Mozilla Opera

It's a Trojan, that can be inserted by a "maliciously constructed website". Seems that you Windows geeks had better stop using IE for a while. Opera and Mozilla are nice alternatives...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/33187.html

Talkback was created by a company called Full Circle Software. I did some work for them in 1998, and I believe they already had a license agreement with Netscape at that point. The initial work goes back quite a bit further.

More info on Talkback is available here.

- Scott

You can't embed an image in the href text, so I don't see how this suggestion gains us anything at all.

Actually, you can.
data URL examples

Sick, eh?

This is a really cool idea, actually. Two things though: it increases the document size a good deal, since the my email address (19 characters) becomes a 1383 character string. This could really add up if you had more than one email address on the page (such as a mailing list archive). Although, in the world of broadband, thats a small price to pay.

The other thing is, if you are using this, you'd be wise to change the string 'hiveware_enkoder' to something unique. The reason being, if spam harvesters really wanted to, they could recognize that string, and have their own javascript engine handy run the script to get at the email address hidden inside. That's a lot of work, but not entirely impossible. If the Hiveware system gains many users, it might be worthwhile for them.

not my favorite browser, thanks.
here's my fav... http://www.mozilla.org/

Microsoft is hoping everyone has forgotten about the Quality Feedback Agent that Netscape has had for years in the 4.x series browsers and above. http://wp.netscape.com/communicator/navigator/v4.5 /qfs1.html Mozilla has the same thing. http://www.mozilla.org/quality/qfa.html This is nothing new. Just more blatant technology theft from the company that made it famous in a society that accepts theft as "fair competition". If you want to argue, go search for the current "Sendo vs. Microsoft" case.

and makes pages load faster for MSIE users

To expand on that statement a little bit, when a web page is fully compliant with the HTML 4.0 or XHTML standards, the browser will operate in "standards-compliant mode" (aka "strict mode", "full standards mode" or just "standards mode"). If not standards compliant, the browser will operate in "compatibility mode" (aka "Traditional mode", "Loose mode" or "quirks mode"). The standards-compliant mode will render the page much faster than the compatibility mode. That is true for both IE and Mozilla. The mode is selected by examining the DOCTYPE declaration. Also, the way that the page is rendered could vary depending on the mode the browser had decided to operate in.

What we need is a lean browser that just barely complies with the standards, and does nothing more than that in its base version.

"Just barely complies with the standards?" What the hell does that mean? You can comply with some of the standards, all of the standards, or none of the standards, but "just barely" complying doesn't even mean anything.

Your browser can comply with a bare subset of standards, but then it still has a million rendering decisions to make about the issues it chose to ignore. It's not like complying with more standards is what's bloating your browser.

In any case, the reason standards followers have sites that look crappy in Netscape 4- is the same reason non-standards followers have the same thing: they don't test, and they don't bother to learn the ins and outs of what they're doing. These people are always going to be leaving out part of their audience, and they'll be doing so ignorantly.

It's perfectly possible to code standards-compliantly in ways that work in legacy browsers. I'm not an expert in it, but I've seen it done many times.

Semantic and accessible HTML is becoming more and more important. More and more of your browsing audience will be on mobile devices. More and more of your browsing audience will be handicapped. Y'know why? Because more and more people are developing sites they can use. And of course, this isn't to mention the bandwidth and development costs you save with well-formed, meaningful HTML and CSS.

Now, don't get me wrong---if you're designing MountainDew.com, you don't give a flip about accessibility because you're all about experience, not information. People don't come to mountaindew.com for information, so why should they worry about it? But if your site IS about information, then you're shutting out FAR more of your potential audience by saying "It's going to look good in legacy browsers, dammit" than you are by saying "Legacy browsers get all of my content, but not my presentation."

Oh, and incidentally, Mozilla Firebird is a stripped-down version of Mozilla's browser component. It has about half the footprint (~6.5 MB) of Mozilla (~12 MB), it renders very fast, and it's good the moment you unzip it. No installation required.

I'm no programmer, but I don't imagine any browser with a 2MB footprint is going to be rendering much of anything.

• There is a beta of Mozilla that has native support for SVG.
• GNOME 2.2 can use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager
• Adobe certainly endorses it
• Corel
• Webdraw
• SVG Map Maker
• and the list goes on

It's irritating the way the world is enslaved to such an awful spyware-magnet standards-flouting browser as MS Internet Explorer.

Microsoft declared IE6 SP1 as the last standalone browser for lame-ass reasons. The truth is, they're only truly integrating IE into the next Windows Operating System for the first time, to prove their 'point' in the anti-trust case that they couldn't remove the browser from the OS.

If IE really was such an integral part of the current slew of windows versions, how come it takes ridiculously long to load when you enter a URL into the address bar of an explorer window, and that the people at LitePC was able to remove IE from the Windows operating system?

Bunch of liars. Guys, help educate everyone and have people switch to either Mozilla or Opera -> Makes Windows boxes more secure and gets rid of the need to buy those stupid superflous pop-up killers. (you can pick up viruses or spyware just by surfing a maliciously coded website and hitting the wrong button)

None of my family and friends use IE anymore after I educated them about the dangers of IE.

Please, take some time and help the Mozilla Foundation and their efforts to improve the performance speed. Please Donate Some Time and Coding Knowledge to Fix this Bug. Thank you.

FYI, the preview is available at http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/betaframed .html, and it is only for Win98-WinXP. I hadn't known it existed until this comment--thanks.

Also, there is one person working on a native implementation of SVG for Mozilla. I hope he gets more help and stabilizes the SVG code soon so that I won't need Adobe's SVG Viewer.

You'll need to add some additional code to allow for features such as search & replace, but all that'd take is a few lines of ECMAScript/javascript...

There is no excuse for not running moz 95% of the time. And you get tabs!

mozilla.org

You have a variety of options:

- this one

- that one

Legislation is one way to go about it - I personally think that if a spammer legitimately uses their own mail server to e-mail people, it should be legal...annoying, but legal. For the individual who's fed up with Spam I would stress the importance of spam filtering methods.

The best way of stopping spams from hitting your inbox seems to be using a Bayesian filter such as SpamBayes or a filter-enabled mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird. I've recently started using the latter and have been quite relieved to see spam floods become a thing of the past.

Sure, it won't reduce the cost that mail servers endure to transfer the spams themselves, but the end user can save the time they would have used to sort through a delete what they find.

however, if you have ever tried to get joe-average-desktop-user to set up gpg or pgp then you know that something has to be made easier! even the point-n-click solutions like winpt or mac-gpg (my fave!) make my dad's head ring.

Really, now... I've gotten several of my friends, friends who use Windows, and mostly for games, email, and word processing, to use GnuPG. Naturally, they can't (and don't care to learn how to) use it well on the command-line or really use it to its full potential, but they can use it for email.

It's a matter of downloading the Win32 build from gnupg.org (anybody who uses the Internet can click to download something) and extracting it to c:\gnupg, which nowadays Windows can do without a helper, then installing Mozilla Thunderbird (or the Mozilla suite) and Enigmail. All basically point-and-click. Enigmail even helps you create a keypair.

It's hardly difficult to do, and even understanding the basics ("If I sign this but don't encrypt it, anybody can read it, but they'll know I wrote it... If I encrypt it, then only the person[s] I encrypt it to will be able to read it, but there's no guarantee I sent it... etc.) are not difficult, I think, for the average user. It's just that not enough people know such a thing exists, and is so easy to use.

I point to a short informational page at the bottom of all my email (it's all signed). It's not much yet, mostly links, but it may help spread the awareness of PGP, at least to people with whom I exchange email.

From what you describe it sounds like you're using IE. There is absolutely no reason to do so, and I strongly encourage you to use Opera instead. Mozilla is pretty good too.

One of the added benefits is that you download .pdf just like any other file type - it goes in the transfer manager and you open it at your leisure without Acrobat taking over your browser window.

I would if I could, but my browser does not support that, AFAIK (bugs 19118, 94035). My understanding is that it is a complicated issue.

Mozilla has got native SVG support

No, Opera is not based on Mozilla in any way. The Opera source code is completely separate from any other browser and is closed source.

Additionally, the Mozilla browser is now being developed by the Mozilla Foundation, not by Netscape.

Mozilla "Bug" 217601 - patent 5,838,906 embedding of objects in hypermedia documents

IE isn't the only web browser.

The specifications leave certain decisions up to the browser (and the user), so it's never going to be pixel-for-pixel identical. However:

• Mozilla1+/Netscape6+ (including Camino/Firebird/etc) should render pretty much identically on all platforms. Any differences are considered bugs and ought to be reported.
• Safari should render equivalently to Konqueror, just with lickable widgets.
• One would hope that Opera is comparable across platforms.
• MSIE for Mac is no longer being developed and will be substantially ignorable within a year.

There are numerous known methods for disabling that feature, such as 1, 2, 3

That said, for my wife and other non technical users, KDE is wonderful. I hope the stable release comes soon.

About a week ago, I found that I was getting spammed multiple times from multiple sources, all by different routes, but within the same minute. Because of this, I concluded that this was spamming caused by viruses. Here's a link where I show the spam I got, plus a bunch of the different headers. If you're technically adept, you'll be able to figure this out. If not, well, the other links may be more useful.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/6/23747/49282

It turns out that I was right.

I searched for more information, and got this [I suggest reading the rest of this first. After that, you can go and view the links. I believe these links are safe.]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/3/6257/30997

At this point, I sent it on to my Dad, and asked him to forward it to JMU Computing Services. A few days later, he sent back to me the quoted portion that I've appended at the end of this.

Here's the summary of what's going on. It turns out that some virus/trojan horse/worm writer has gotten together with spammers. They exploit a known, but unfixable flaw in Internet Explorer to take control of your computer without you having to even click anything. All you have to do is go to the wrong website.

Once you do this, the computer installs a .DLL file that is opened when Internet Explorer starts up. The .DLL file will then download spam from the internet, and start sending it to all those addresses in your address book. Apparently, if you have P2P installed [Kazaa, for example], it makes use of that, too, to spam everyone you know. As an added bonus, because your computer is now sending out spam, it will work really slowly at everything else. Sorry, but priorities are priorities, and the spammers/virus writers have their own priorities which aren't necessarily yours.

Are you infected? Ultimately, since the real problem is in Internet Explorer, then as long as you have that, there's no way of knowing, except if your firewall reports that it is doing a lot of internet work without you clicking anything. If you don't understand firewalls, then the only way you can tell is that your computer is really, really slow on the internet. Understand that the worms used this month will change next month.

But if you are infected with the instance described in my links, the files to look for are C:\MSDOS.EXE and a file called wthunk32.dll (though I do not know where that will be. You'll have to use 'Find File' to search for it.) Now, if you have it, you can use the process described on the 2nd link above, to see if it's really spamming. Or, you can just rename it to another name (like _wthunk32.dll , with an underscore before the name, and c:\_msdos.exe), and everything should be fine. If you're worried that this might be bad advice, by all means, first make a bootable floppy, and copy these two files to the floppy before you do anything else. Then, if worst comes to worst, you can always boot the floppy, and restore things to their previous state.

Anyhow... if you notice, the advice from JMU Computing Services, below, is "just don't use Internet Explorer to go to any new websites." If you don't think that's acceptable, let me suggest another option:

Go to http://www.mozilla.org.

and download the heir to Netscape. It's free, it's open-source, and it's a ton more secure. It's what I use. It's also a lot more convenient than Internet Explorer, because it has this neat feature called "Tabs". When you right-click a link in Internet Explorer, you have the option "open in a new window". Well, you h

Not all of us have to...

Opera annoys me, Instead of going for standards compliance, they've sought to emulate every little IE bug, and even to present itself as IE in order to fool stupid webdesigners that try to refuse connection to browsers other than IE. It's not helping anyone, it's bug-emulation isn't perfect which creates it's own problems. I find Mozilla Firebird a much better, and standards compliant alternative.

Image number AA024508 at Photodisc (creative.gettyimages.com, select Photodisc). Scroll down in a mozilla browser, the guy who wrote this page obviously didn't care about us _REAL_ users... just the SCO's of the world. ;)

Bugzilla has a open evangalism bug about this specific site.

This is primarily because Thunderbird has to be shipped with all the accompanying Mozilla technologies. ie, Gecko, XPCOM, etc, etc. Why is this? It's because the GRE isn't done. The GRE is an attempt to create a separate runtime library distribution containing just the core Mozilla libraries which other Mozilla-based projects can leverage, rather than having each project come with it's own copy. Not only would this save disk space, but also runtime memory usage as well (since Thunderbird and Firebird could use the same shared libraries).

The Composer++ project isn't aiming to make a standalone version of Composer. It's a testbed for new Composer features. Things get debugged there, then integrated into the main Mozilla tree.

This is sort of, but not quite true. Composer++ was originally some off-trunk work on composer that got integrated back into the main suite version. But Daniel Glazman, who was responsible for Composer++ has been slowly creating a standalone version of composer. See for example one of the relevant weblog postings
or one of the relevant bugs

There is a Mozilla Calendar project at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/.

I don't think it's got the advanced scheduling capability of Outlook (yet?) but you can share calendars by publishing them to a WebDAV server. You can get a free, open source WebDAV server with either mod_dav for Apache, or with the Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.x releases.

You need an Firebird extension -- Tab Browser Extension -- which sometimes works on its own, and sometimes needs help from the registry (this is a win32 problem only, AFAIK).

Do you recall what those registry changes might be? I checked the Tab Browser Extension page, but I didn't see mention of them there. And, I do hope that it's not the "supportDDEExec false trick", since that apparently no longer works ;).

All right, so that looks like it might solve the open-in-a-new-tab bit :). As for inline autocomplete, I can't speak for previous builds, but I didn't see it in the nightly build that I tried last night.

These standalone releases are temporary, of sorts. In time, the Mozilla 1.x suite will be this very suite of applications -- Firebird ("Mozilla Browser"), Thunderbird ("Mozilla Mail"), etc. You will be able to choose them separately at install time. I think you will still be able to download Firebird separately too, if you wish.

To be honest, it's all very complicated, and I probably have it wrong. I highly recommend you take a look at the Mozilla Roadmap. They clearly have a much better grasp of this than I do.

Overall, I'm sure this will solve some of the version number problems you describe.