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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 Released
An anonymous reader submits: The Mozilla Thunderbird (stand-alone Mozilla based mail/news reader) developers have just released their first milestone: version 0.1, available for Mac
Linux,
Mac OS X
and Windows. The v0.1 release notes highlight some of the bigger features like customizable toolbars, UI extensions, contact manager sidebar, simplified UI, 3-pane mail window option, and spell checker. Also of note, Mozilla's usage share has risen from 1.2% in February to 1.6% now, a 33% improvement!"
Now they need to figure out why...
My guess is that people are using Mozilla to get a handle on pop-ups.
One of my favorite features in Evolution is the safe preview: when you look at an email message, it renders the message in all ways that do not involve hitting a server. So an HTML message with bold, italics, colors, pictures, etc. will display correctly... except for anything that would touch a server.
Why is this important? Because spammers make special URLs that encode your email address, and their servers use the special URLs to track you. If you even preview the message in Outlook, or in Mozilla Mail, their server gets a hit and they know your email address is a good one.
There is a command on a menu, "Load Images", that will go ahead and put hits on servers and render the message completely. You can use this for email from sources you trust. (It ought to be a toolbar button, but it isn't yet in Evolution.)
If Thunderbird doesn't already have this, I ought to file a bug.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
In the same period Netscape has lost more users than Mozilla has gained.
It states IE6 adoption is increasing (my gran could've told you that) but fails to state the movement of MS's overall market share.
This only served to remind me of a call I had from a little old lady today that was using Netscape 7.1 for her e-mail.
She'd been using the internet since the Old Days, back when Netscape was being used by the masses. The problem is that the mail client for Netscape 7 likes to use the sidebar buttons entirely too much.
How too much? Twice, to be exact. Only twice, you ask?
Well, twice is way too many. Because once you hide your mailbox list on the left side, and the message index pane at the top, all you see is the one message you had selected.
Or, when you start the application, you see the web page that you put in as the start page for mail (god knows why you'd want one). So all our Little Old Lady from Silicon Valley could see was our home page. Which happened to also have a link to our webmail. Imagine her confusion when she found that she had no mail when she logged on that way. Not to mention the confusion of the level 1 techs below me, who couldn't quite decipher what the hell was going on.
This is where the story gets interesting, and more importantly, points out some very important interface design flaws in Netscape and Mozilla.
Those buttons to hide and unhide the left and top panes are strictly for the sort that reads Slashdot. Their purpose is not obvious. Their very existence is not obvious. And if one were to click them accidentally, it's not obvious what happened. More importantly though, is that they are fucking impossible to describe over the phone. They don't look like buttons. Hell, the border that they reside on isn't something you can describe either, especially when the border that exists around the web page being displayed is much more obvious. Personally, I'm certain that there is no real reason to use them in an e-mail program, because quite honestly, the folders list should always be visible, and the index list should likewise always be visible. If they should ever disappear, the user will invariably wonder where they went and complain to someone like me. Outlook Express at least, has menu choices to bring them back. Netscape does not.
Netscape will never again be ready for primetime. There are two reasons for this: IE and Outlook Express comes with every computer on the planet, (or near enough to make no odds) and Netscape's/Mozilla's interface was designed by geeks, for geeks. While this makes it superior because of better features, it makes it very hard to do technical support for it over the phone. As such, people like me will continue to recommend it to customers, and will continue to get people started with it in the first place. It simply makes our jobs easier.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
... but of course that depends on coders to be consistent with their numbering, which they aren't: one person's 0.1 could be anothr persons 5.2! Bear in mind that this is based on established, well-tested mozilla code. By all means back up your mail, but 0.1 does NOT imply that it's going to eat your mail, trash your disk or anything like that!
Oh get off your high horse. As if Microsoft never came up with stupid UI/program decisions. The second I start up OE6, MSN messenger decides that it's needed, for no reason, despite it being turned off in the options dialog. How is any reasonable person supposed to know that the "contacts" bar in OE opens up MSN messenger? Certainly isn't immediately obvious (my mail program should not be opening up my IM, particularly not one I don't ever use) to the end user. This took a question to the MSN newsgroups to solve.
And maybe in between your ranting you would've realized that Thunderbird is NOT Mozilla Mail 1.4. This program is geared for the masses, much like Firebird is supposed to be the common man's Mozilla. Maybe you would've even realized that Thunderbird fixes the very problem you're bitching about. No "my sidebar", no grippy to accidentally close the folder list with.
There ARE tangible benefits to moving over to Thunderbird, spam filtering among them. Intangible benefits include not being reliant on Microsoft for everything.