Thunderbird for Me, Firefox for the Family

One of the things I did on my holidays was to re-install my computer and get rid of all that junk on it. After about 18 months and it accumulated all manner of cruft and things were crashing. I took the opportunity not only to go to Firefox 1.0 (I’d been using 0.9 before) but to ditch Outlook as well for Thunderbird 1.0, released on the day I re-installed.

Kumi and I have been using Firefox for a while now, and apart from the odd site site that doesn’t support things (like the shopping cart at www.diy.com) it’s golden. You can always invoke IE with the “IEview” extention if you’re really stuck. After that, I love the tabs, playing with mouse gestures, looking for extentions and stuff. So much more fun than boring old IE. And spyware doesn’t get a look in.

So now it’s undergoing The Ultimate Test. I’ve installed it on may parents’ machines, deleted all mention of IE and made Firefox the default browser. After a week, I’ve heard not a peep about it. So far, so good.

Thunderbird isn’t quite as slick as Firefox, but it’s nearly there. The only thing I miss from Outlook is dragging-and-dropping file attachments to message windows. It’s rather slow at times, but it’s rock solid. Spam filtering is great (I now see about one a day if that). Not sure I’d unleash it on Kumi yet though.