Tuesday July 13, 2004

Firefox & Thunderbird: my setup

Another technical entry, but this time not Java related.

For quite a long time (years really) I have been using Mozilla a my main browser and mailer. About a year ago, I think, I switched to Firefox (aka Pheonix, aka Firebird) the standalone browser and Thunderbird, the standalone mailer. Both are from the Mozilla Foundation, so they inherited from the years of development and debugging that were put into the Mozilla suite. Why did I switch? Mostly because I wanted something a bit lighter, because I liked the look and feel better and also because I wanted to support an initiative that I thought was worthwhile (meaning: I thought it would be fun).

Besides all the security and privacy advantages, which are getting a lot of publicity these days, I like the extension mechanism and I wanted to share with you the few I use:

• Firefox Extensions:
  • AdBlock: This one is a must. I just can't live without it anymore. It let you filters out advertisements and other nasties (like web bugs, and other tracking meachanisms) based on pattern matching. A real life safer.
  • SwitchProxy: If like me you change your proxy on a regular basis (happens a lot on a laptop, or when switching between VPNs), this is a very useful toolbar. It let you pick a proxy setting from a drop-down menu. Very neat.
  • Dictionnary Search: Another must. Select a word, right-click to get the context menu and launch a dictionary search in a separate tab, and yes, you can configure which online dictionary to use. Very useful when blogging!
  • Noia 2.0 Extreme: Not an extension, but the theme I use. Very nice. On top of that, it does exist for Thunderbird (see below), so I have a unified look and feel for both apps.
• Thunderbird extensions:
  • Contact Sidebar: List your contacts from your address book in the sidebar, below your folders. Pretty neat.
  • Free Desktop Integration: Another must if you're using Linux or Solaris. What this extension does is use the notification area in the Gnome (or KDE) toolbar to let you know when a new mail arrived. That way your mailer can be iconified and you still get a visual notification. The Linux binary is available on the page, I had to port the sources to Solaris (Solaris 10 with Gnome 2.6 to be exact), but it works fine.
  • EnigMail: A very powerful extension that let you encrypt and decrypt your mail with PGP or GnuPG.
  • Noia 2.0: Again, not an extension but a very nice theme. See above.

That's it for now. Don't hesitate to let me know what your favorite extension is (yes, I know about mouse gestures, I just don't like them that much).