Journal ShaiHulud-23's Journal: I'm making the switch 1
I've been using Mozilla 1.2 as my default browser in Windows for about six weeks, finally got around to upgrading to 1.3 a couple days ago. It has been a gradual transition, and is not yet complete, but I hope to eventually pull away from the stranglehold IE and Outlook have on my browsing/mailing life.
I had been reluctant to tear away from IE mainly because it's just so handy, being deeply embedded in my OS so it opens almost instantly when I click the icon... Mozilla can take an agonizing 8-12 seconds to launch and I'm a busy man. But, the quicklaunch option is nice. It just keeps Mozilla running as a process, even though no windows are open. Which, of course, is exactly how IE opens so fast too, since it's always running whenever Windows is running.
I was also slow to adopt the big lizard because IE seems to render most pages so perfectly and reliably, with very few display quirks. This is, of course, because most pages are designed specifically to look and function best in IE on Windows since that is what the vast majority of web surfers are using. But a properly built, standards-compliant page will look just as good in Mozilla as in IE, so ultimately the display quirks are the fault of the designers, not of the browser. I do kind of like being able to color the scrollbars with CSS, and maybe future versions of Mozilla will incorporate this essentially frivolous yet attractive ability.
As I've become increasingly paranoid about security and privacy, and increasingly aggressive about denying the invasive marketroids access to my life, I came to appreciate Mozilla's privacy and security features. I like being able to see what sites I've saved passwords for and purge just those I no longe r wish to save, rather than purging my ENTIRE password cache as IE forces me to. Yes yes if I were truly paranoid I would never save any passwords on any site, but hell it's just so convenient. But I'm the only one who uses this machine, WinXP is itself password protected, and I have a master password for Mozilla as well so I think it's secure enough for my purposes.
One of the best Mozilla features is the pop up suppression. I've been using panicware's Pop Up Stopper with IE for months and was mostly satisfied with it, but I did get kind of tired of having to hold down a key when I *wanted* to open a second window. Pop Up Stopper works on the OS level, preventing a second instance of the application to load into memory. Moz's built-in popup suppression just disables browser spawning on automated events like onLoad, onUnload, onBlur, etc, the tactics used by the aforementioned invasive marketroids. So if I click on a link that is targeted to a new window, the window opens normally since it was the result of my action. Beautiful.
So the Mozilla web browser wins out over IE for its better privacy management, and is at least as good as IE in load time and page display. Add to that nifty developer features like the DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger, and it's overall a much more useful browser. Plus it looks nice (I'm using the Orbit skin currently, got tired of Skypilot's darkness).
But now for the even harder conversion: Email. Back in the day, I used Netscape mail in versions 3 and 4 on my old Mac. Then I switched to Eudora for various reasons I won't bother mentioning because they're irrelevant. But then I got a PC, and by this time was fed up with NS4 being so sucky since IE5 was out and had utterly blown it away. On my new PC, I didn't even bother installing NS4. Outlook Express was already there and did everything I needed, so I used it, and used it faithfully for about two years.
I switched to Outlook when I upgraded from Win2k to WinXP, and while it has bunches of useless bloat, I did quickly become attached to the integrated calendar. I get polite reminders when all my bills are due, and can jot down whatever other events and reminders I like. This was something other mail clients don't offer, not even Outlook Express. Sure there are other calendars, but then I have to run even more applications simultaneously and switch around between them, so screw that. I was satisfied with Outlook as my mail client for the time being.
Then came Mozilla 1.3 with the included Mozilla Mail client, now featuring integrated Bayesian spam filtering and I was intrigued. I don't get very much spam to my "real" email address, as I've managed to keep it fairly well guarded. However, I did make the mistake of using it in an online resume posting during my jobsearch about a year ago, and within a few weeks it had been harvested by a cartel of recruitment spammers operating under half a dozen domain names, hawking the same resume forwarding scam under a few different names. I'm pretty sure they're all the same company and none of them work worth a damn. And every time I blocked one domain, they spammed me from another. My address was also public and unmunged on my tiny design firm's site for a time, just long enough to get harvested by the likes of coolstats.com and numerous offshore development spammers trying to get me to outsource web work (hah, if only they knew that I have no work to outsource.) Even so, I only get maybe one spam a week. But given my increasing hostility to spammers, that is enough to fill me with rage each time I get one. I use Mailwasher as a spam filter and it does a good job, I'm very happy with it. But it's yet another application to run and another step in the simple task of checking email. So I was interested in a mail client with decent spam filtering built in.
But I didn't want to lose my calendar... then behold, a calendar integrated into Mozilla! It's been in beta for a while, but it was recently announced to be code-complete and ready for integration into future builds of Mozilla, and will be included in the 1.4 release whenever that happens to come. For now, it's available as an add-on and I've been tinkering with it for a couple days and it seems to do what I need it to do. So now I'm finally prepared to make the full conversion.
I have quite a large archive of mail over the past couple years, much of which can be deleted but some of it I want to save. Importing these few hundred messages into Mozilla Mail will be a pain, so I may simply sort through the ones I want to keep, import those, and archive the rest into an Outlook file. Meanwhile, I'm anxious to start teaching Mozilla's spam filters, and I even removed the blocked domains from my mail server just to get some fresh samples (got two from the formerly-blocked coolstats.com and one from the formerly-blocked recruitinghelper.com already.) Over the next few days or weeks, I intend to become fully Mozilla-dependent, and eschew the IE/Outlook/Mailwasher triumvirate that has served me well for so long.
I changed my mind... (Score:1)