The Fnordistan Department of Software Engineering

Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird’s browser counterpart, is rapidly becoming the browser of choice for Internet “power surfers.” It’s more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer, and has all the functionality and then some!

It is customizeable with themes that allow you to choose the look-and-feel of your browser, and a vast assortment of extensions that add useful little features that you never would have thought of on your own, but quickly find indispensable.

Here are some of my favorite extensions:

• Sage — Collects all your RSS and Atom feeds, making it quick and easy to check for updates on your favorite sites.
• Adblocker — Like a spam-filter for the WWW. Like an e-mail filter, you have to spend some time “training” it by adding regexes for images to block, but soon you can surf the most banner-laden sites (like Yahoo!) with nary an image to bother you. You can also be extremely selective (for example, I generally like to see Amazon’s recommendations, but I do not want to see Paris Hilton’s horsey face in that jewelry ad they keep pushing, so Zap! No more Paris Hilton ads!)
• Bookmark Backup — Ever lost your bookmarks file because you had to reinstall your browser? I have. Now you can have your bookmarks backed up to a separate directory automatically, every time you close Firefox.
• TinyURL Creator — Automatically create a TinyURL from your current page or any other link, for quick pasting into a message.
• Bandwidth Tester — Test your current connection speed any time.
• IE View — If you’re like me and you use a bank or other financial institution that uses stupid IE ActiveX controls or other non-standard crap that makes their site unusable without Internet Explorer, this extension lets you quickly pop open the page you are looking at in MSIE. Also useful for cross-browser web development.

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client for quite some time now. Only one little feature (or rather, lack thereof), has annoyed me:

I normally have it set to block images in my e-mail from being loaded by default, since this is one way spammers harvest “live” e-mail addresses — even if you immediately delete the e-mail, as soon as you click on it you’ve connected to the remote server where the linked image is hosted, and an embedded link can tell the spammer that a live person just viewed e-mail sent to goober@iluvspam.com.

However, I also regularly receive e-mail with embedded images that I want to view — my daily MyComics subscription and some 3D graphics fora newsletters, for example. So before viewing those, I have to manually go to the Tool|Options menu, choose “Advanced Settings”, unlock loading of images, view the e-mail, and then go back and block loading of images again.

Not anymore!

Thunderbird 0.8 added a feature where you can block loading of remote images except in e-mails sent from addresses in your personal and/or collected addresses list. So now I can add the addresses of those graphics-laden lists to my collected addresses book, and viola! I automatically get to view images from senders I have designated, while everyone else is blocked!

It’s a small thing, it was probably trivial to program, but it has just made Thunderbird significantly more pleasant and convenient for me.

If you are still using Outlook or Outlook Express…. why???