Mozilla

Most people know about Mozillas ability to block popup windows. But Mozilla can do more : it blocks images from certain advertisment sites, or, if you want a less aggressive approach, only shows 1 loop of animated images (or stop the animation at all). But the most exciting feature is a plugin that blocks Flash animations. This site has more coverage of ad and Flash blocking in Mozilla.

Looks like ThunderBird (the new Mozilla mail client) is finally launched with its 0.1 release. Now that Mozilla development slows down (Mozilla 1.5 only contains some Composer enhancements), I expect the FireBird and ThunderBird packages slowly to develop the stampede we had with the Mozilla 0.9 series. God, what a wonderfull wild ride that was... As soon as ThunderBird hits Debian unstable, we'll give it a try.

It's already some days since AOL cut the remaining Netscape staff, after AOL sold its soul to Microsoft. Some people call the firing of the Netscape crew the death of Netscape. It seems true, now that Internet Explorer has absolute control in website statistics. However, there are signs that something is terribly wrong with IE : IE6 is stone old, but IE7 will not be released within the next year. If you realise that most corporate desktops still offer IE5.5, you can count on it that IE7 will not reach your computer at work before 2005.

Ongoing writes the following : Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroads, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one we'll be on in a year. A lot of people who will read this have the chance to make a difference in the decision. Let's look at the options...
I'm quite certain that the FireBird and ThunderBird siblings of Mozilla will open a new browser competition : Mozilla as it is now, is simply too big to be used as a lean browser, certainly if you want to compare it against small browsers like Galeon, Opera, Camino and Safari. Debian is again light years ahead : AFAIK, it is the only distribution which has separate packages for the Mozilla components.

In the mean time, some people are watching Microsoft like a hawk.

Do you realize you actually can choose the browser you are working with ? Why do you want to use a browser without any development or security patching ? So quit using Internet Explorer, and start using Mozilla : here are 101 things Mozilla can do and IE not. And in case you're still experiencing problems, head over to the excellent Mozilla Tips website. Check out this very cool Amazon XUL interface (only visible in Mozilla).

Mozex, Mother of Extension, is here (screenshots). It offers quite a few options for the use of external program actions. The screenshot explains it all : handle news by slrn, mail by mutt and view source with vim. The best news I've heard, erm read, is that it's compatible with both the Mozilla Suite and Firebird. Install it now!

And more Mozilla news : the first Thunderbird builds are ready : ThunderBird is the Mozilla standalone mail client who will, together with the FireBird browser, replace the Mozilla browser suite in the very near future.