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Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Firefox-style Tabs
daria42 writes "A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers." From the article: "It is unlikely the feature will be found in Mozilla's imminent release of Thunderbird 1.5 -- currently in testing -- but software developer Myk Melez has put test versions of Thunderbird online with the tabbed browsing feature included. However, there are doubts over the suitability of these downloads for production use as they are based on bleeding-edge 'unofficial' code. "
Who can I complain to if Firefox screws me
Do you really think that you can complain to MS when IE screws you?
The best of luck, my poor deluded friend.
Now that I've taken a closer look at Thunderbird's tabs I will offer my opinion: they are doing it wrong. Tabs should replace all windows, but Thunderbird's tabs seem to only allow tabbing through the small email preview box.
What I'd like to see is a fully tabbed interface where the address book would open in a tab, an integrated Sunbird calendar would open in another tab (if Sunbird is installed), each email would open in their own tabs, etc.
Simply tabbing through previews seems like a half-assed way to do it. It still looks moderately useful at the expense of having an inconsistent interface.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I used Lotus Notes for years at my last job. At my current job, we use Outlook.
Lotus Notes. Is. BETTER!
Who cares if it looks a little ugly, there are some themes you can skin it with too. If you're thinking about the workspaces with big square icons, that's now a legacy feature: Notes now uses a sidebar with essentially what are folders.
But the real meat is in usability. Maybe it takes a little getting used to, but the interface actually gets pretty efficient when you've used it for a while. Lotus Notes is also 100 times better for mobile users, or even remote users on slow VPN connections. Ever tried to use Outlook remotely? You can be editing an email and the editor will freeze every couple minutes, for a minute or two, while the client check for new mail. Lotus Notes doesn't lock up your client when a connection is lost, and Replication has always been handled well.
Lotus Notes is much more flexible than Outlook, too. We had thousands of forms and applications in Notes, making it easy to do things like get a production report or submit change requests and purchase orders. It's easy to keep them organized and see who did what, and when. I spent several million dollars of company money through that system. Maybe you can set a similar system up in Outlook, I don't know, but at least where I now work no one has bothered. Everything is done via Word documents and no one knows what the most recent version is, and they all look different.
I've used both, and my opinion is that for the users, if you just want to get work done, Notes does the job. Maybe Outlook is easier for you IT administrators to set up, but a few hours of YOUR time is nothing compared to a few hours of everyone in the company's time. I seriously waste time now waiting for Outlook to do something and creating new forms or hunting down a document in a folder somewhere.