IMS_Blog

Having said that I won’t be switching to Firefox but sticking with the suite I’ve had a small change of heart. Firefox does seem to be the way my favourite browser is going (and the platform for which the coolest extensions get made), and I think it’s only fair I give it a chance. So I’ve installed Thunderbird 0.9 alongside Firefox 1.0 and Sunbird too (I could have had Calendar as an extension to either of the other two but if we’re going separate apps, what the hell). I’ll try them out for a week and see how far I get with them, if I really can live with different applications like that rather than the integration of the suite.

So, getting set up. Well, Firefox is installed and I was able to use the import feature to get across my bookmarks, passwords and cookies from Mozilla. Also copied across my userContent.css. I’ve installed a lot of extensions, some which I’m used to with the suite, some which add functionality back in that comes as standard with the suite and some new. The whole version number on extensions, while understandable in some ways, is quite annoying when a new release like 1.0 comes out because perfectly good extensions won’t work. Either find a version repackaged to be compatible or bump the maxversion number up yourself. Anyway, the following are installed (list produced by InfoLister):

Basics 1.0

Adds a new tab button on the tab bar.

Bloglines Toolkit 1.5

Browser utilities for use with Bloglines

BugMeNot 0.6

Bypass compulsory web registration with the context menu via www.bugmenot.com.

Checky 2.4

Easy to use interface to many free and commercial online validation and analysis services. Validate and analyse HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, RSS, XML, WAI, Section 508, P3P, hyperlinks, metadata and many more. Adds a context and tools menu.

ChromEdit 0.1.1.1

A Simple User Profile File Editor

Customizable Toolbar Buttons 0.1.5

Dedicated To Extension Geeks.

Delicious Delicacies 0.3

Restores our favourite placeholder text.

Download Statusbar 0.9.1

View downloads in an auto-hide statusbar.

Duplicate Tab 0.3.2

Allows you to duplicate a tab, or to merge the windows.

Enhanced History Manager 0.4.1.02

Flexible History Management

Ext2Abc 0.2

Alphabetizes your extension manager list.

fireFTP 0.85.1

FTP client for Mozilla Firefox.

Flat Bookmark Editing 0.6

Edit bookmarks in the bookmark manager, without opening the properties window.

FoxyTunes 1.0

Control any media player from Firefox and more…

Hide Searchbar 0.2

This extension allows you to hide or show the search bar when Ctrl+Shift+S is pressed.

InfoLister 0.7.2

Lists vital development information about Firefox

JavaScript Console SideBar 2004.09.09

Shows the JavaScript Console in the SideBar.

keyconfig 20040910

Rebind your keys.

Link Toolbar 0.9

A site navigation toolbar

LiveLines 0.3.1

Add RSS feeds to Bloglines or Sage with the RSS icon on the status bar.

MiniT 20040920.3

Adds a few tab related functions

Popup ALT Attribute 1.3.2004102501

Popups alternate texts of images or others like NetscapeCommunicator(Navigator) 4.x.

PrefBar 2.3.1

A toolbar for quickly accessing and changing common preferences, run scripts and many more…

QuickNote 0.6

A note taking extension with advanced features

RadialContext 2004.11.08

Replaces the standard context menu with a radial one.

ScrapBook 0.9.2

This extension helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.

SessionSaver 0.2

Magically restores your last browser session

Single Window 1.4

Single window mode for Firefox and Mozilla.

SpellBound 0.6.0

Composer Spell Checker ported to Firefox

Things They Left Out 0.1.4.2

All the things an Options panel shouldn’t be

undoclosetab 20040617

Adds Undo Close Tab.

User Agent Switcher 0.6

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

Web Developer 0.8

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

ReloadEvery 0.3.2

Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes

Tab Clicking Options 0.2.1

Select actions for clicking events on a tab or the tabbar

Text Link 1.1.2004090301

Allows URI texts written in webpages to be loaded by double clicks.

Calculator 0.7

A calculator with advanced features. Installed in the tools menu.

EMbuttons 0.12.6

Buttons to invoke the Extension and Theme Managers.

Outliner 0.2

Adds a sidebar that displays an outline structure of the current document. Open the sidebar from View - Sidebars - Document Outline.

Tabbrowser Preferences 0.9.96

Enhances control over some aspects of tabbed browsing.

Show Failed URL 0.1.4

Displays failed URLs in the Location Bar when XUL error pages are enabled.

Translate 0.6.0.3

Translate web pages and/or selected text to different languages

Translate Page 0.1

Adds a Translate Page option to the Tools menu.

URI id 0.0.7.3

Allow use of site-specific userContent.css.

JavaScript Debugger 0.9.84

ColorZilla 0.6.5

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.

DerBrowserTimer 0.3.2

Timer/Clock/Alarm add-on for Mozilla FireFox.

JabberZilla 0.1-20040713

Jabber IM Client for Mozilla.

OpenBook 1.2.0

Allows for customization of the Add Bookmark dialog

AutoForm 0.5.5

A tool for automatic form filling

Autofill 0.2

Automatically fill out HTML forms

Minimize to Tray 0.0.1.20041101+

Hides windows into system tray

Adblock 0.5.2.039

Filters ads from web-pages

WeatherFox 0.5.1

Get the weather in any toolbar or statusbar!

That’s a lot. I have to admit there are some pretty cool features in there. There are two things I’m really missing though. The first is Gemal’s Blogupdates in my sidebar. I’ve subscribed to MozillaZine’s Feedhouse, so maybe I won’t miss it too much. The other is that I may have to ditch the Tab extensions and just have done and install Tabbed Browser Extensions just to have Tab Grouping back. I think I may have become to used to tabs being grouped together when I’m browsing three subjects at once to do without it. I also miss the @-moz-document CSS rules that were recently introduced to Mozilla. I’ve tried to reproduce them using URIid but it’s hardly as instinctive or neat. And External Application Buttons would be nice, if I could get it to work :-(

There were a couple of tweaks I made to the preferences via about:config too. First browser.throbber.url was set to this blog’s homepage and keyword.url was set to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q= so typing things in the location bar will do a proper Google search rather than just I’m Feeling Lucky. Oh and a final tweak was to add .searchbar-textbox {width:30em !important;} to userChrome.css to increase the size of the search box.

Thunderbird was a little trickier. On install it helpfully imported the settings and accounts from the suite but didn’t import the local folders, which is a bit of a bugger (and also quite silly as it imported filters, some of which involve moving messages to local folders, which of course were then not there). Also, it doesn’t seem that the import function available from the Tools menu includes an option for the suite. Problem solved by shutting everything down and copying the local folders part of the Mail directory from the seamonkey (suite) profile to the Thunderbird profile. It would also be nice if there were a way to access about:config for Thunderbird. Instead I had to shut Thunderbird down and manually edit prefs.js in the profile directory. That allowed me to set the Get Map of the address book to multimap, add user_pref(“mail.addr_book_mapit_format”, “http://www.multimap.com/map/places.cgi?addr2=@A1&addr3=@CI&pc=@ZIamp;&db=GB&client=public&cname=Great+Britain&advanced=true&mapsize=big”);. I also added user_pref(“mailnews.nav_crosses_folders”, 0); to make the next message button jump across folder without asking.

There are a few extensions installed for Thunderbird too. There doesn’t seem to be a version of InfoLister for it though :-(

Sunbird actually went pretty smoothly. All my calendars are hosted at icalx.com. It was simply a matter of subscribing to them and away I went. The one annoyance is that Sunbird doesn’t seem to remember passwords :-(

Edit: Also added the following to Thunderbird’s prefs.js:

user_pref(“mail.quoted_graphical”, false); user_pref(“mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support”, true);

and to userContent.css:

blockquote[type=cite] { padding-bottom: 0 ! important; padding-top: 0 ! important; padding-left: 0 ! important; border-left: none ! important; border-right: none ! important; }

The above all goes to get rid of the silly coloured bars when displaying quoted text and use > instead.