[Vision2020] mozilla et al. Was Virus infected mail purportedly from "Cweitz"

[David Camden-Britton]

You can install any browser you choose without removing Internet
Explorer. On one machine I have five different web browsers installed
for testing purposes. The only change you're likely to see is when the
program starts up and asks if it can be the default application for
web pages. If you say "No", then Internet Explorer will still fire up
whenever you double-click a URL, or click on a link in your email
program.

As for what you give up by switching to Mozilla products, specifically
Firefox and Thunderbird, only a few cosmetic changes. Though, there
are plenty of web pages out there that are written specifically to
interact with Internet Explorer. So, if you come across something that
doesn't work correctly, fire up IE and check it out. However, I
haven't run into too many of those sorts of pages so far.

With Thunderbird, there's one irritation so far. If you multi-select
messages you can't see what the most recent selection looks like in
the preview pane.  Not sure if they plan to change this for future
releases, but it it is something that Outlook Express does better, in
my opinion.

As to how these programs are different from IE and OE, I'm not sure
how to answer that. My background is in software and technology, so I
just clicked a few buttons that looked obvious to me and I was surfing
pages and getting email. Your mileage will vary. The interface is
pretty similar, with buttons along a top toolbar to help you navigate
forward and back in pages. A built-in search bar for google
(configurable to any search engine) is over to the right. You have the
ability to open loads of browsing tabs, instead of new windows. This
is one of the major benefits of Firefox over Internet Explorer. That
way, precious screen real estate isn't taken up with more windows.

For Thunderbird, I had to set up an email account, which looked a lot
like Netscape 7.0's setup procedure and then I could download email
and write new messages and such. The junk mail filtering feature is
pretty neat. I've got one email account that receives hundreds of spam
a day and after a little bit of tuning I can pretty safely hit "Move
Junk Mail to Deleted Items" and bang, the junk vanishes before I have
to look at it.

Both products support the loading of Extensions. This is another major
strength. I have a couple handy widgets loaded, like the GMail
Composer extension which allows me to highlight a name or link and
right-click to get the option to Compose a new email. I have something
called Magpie Tools loaded which makes it easier to scan through image
collections (purely for research purposes, naturally).

Since you can have several browsers on your system at once, I
encourage experimentation. Many people like Opera, which I seem to
recall as being one of the first major competing browsers to feature
tabbed browsing. However, I really dislike their email client. Still,
once you work with tabs, it's hard to go back to just a single window
per page.

Let me know if you have any further questions, or feel free to contact
me off-list.

-- 
David Camden-Britton  -=)*(=- groovydave at gmail.com

On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 08:36:24 -0700, Sam Scripter (fsr)
<moscowsam at moscow.com> wrote:
> Thank you David Camden-Britton for the website link to mozilla.
> 
> As a long-time user of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, I am VERY reluctant to try a change-over to anything else.  I suspect many other readers on this list feel the same.
> 
> However, I visited the mozilla website and find it intriguing.
> 
> QUESTIONS:
> 
> - Can one have the mozilla applications installed without giving up ones installations of IE and OE?
> 
> - What functionalities does one give up by switching to applications offered in the mozilla suite?
> 
> - What confounding/perplexing things occur for IE and OE users by switching to mozilla applications.
> 
> Sam Scripter