Testing Firefox & Thunderbird

By Charlene Li

I met today with Mozilla Foundation and got their overview of where they're product is heading. For those in the know, Firefox and Thunderbird are Mozilla's open source Web browser and email client offerings, respectively.

i've been using Firefox off and on for the past two weeks and after today will be using it full time for my browsing experience. I'm starting to use Thunderbird today and will post impressions later.

My first take on Firefox is that tabbed browsing is wonderful -- it takes up a lot less space on my desktop (I typically have had a dozen browser windows at a time). But it does take some getting used to as I keep wanting to hit Alt+Tab to get to the other windows. The other feature that I've found very helpful is the CTRL+F function to do a quick search within the page. Firefox scans the page as I type, making it even quicker for me to find what I'm looking for.

I'll also be testing Firefox and Thunderbird on their RSS integration. RSS is a great technology but the current crop of readers are just too complicated for most consumers to figure out.

One last quick note -- if you haven't already, take a look at Spread Firefox which is the marketing site for Firefox. Built on the Civic Space Labs service, Spread Firefox uses much of the technology that helped Howard Dean harness the promotional power of the Net. Most interesting, "affiliates" who sign up to help spread the adoption of Firefox receive points for referrals and downloads, and also have an ID and blog.

If you're interested in trying out Firefox, click on the button for the link (and you'll also be giving me a credit!).

Comments

[bart]

Hi Charlene,

Thanks for taking the time to meet with us yesterday and thanks for the kind words on your blog and for spreading the fire!

Bart

[Ralph Lee]

Have you tried some third party RSS readers? I'm reading your blog through FeedDemon, a particularly user-friendly and smooth Windows RSS reader.

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/