It is now loading faster with my 1 year stored emails, better option dialog, spell-checking when you type…etc. Here’s some noticable new features:

• Auto-save draft, this would be useful if your PC crashed in the middle of composing an email
• Software update is implemented in the same manner as Firefox 1.5 and much more usable
• Podcasting support
• Load and Export all your feeds from and to a OPML file
• Better auto-complete function (most used popup first)
• The release note claimed support of Google Map, not trying out yet

Overall, Thunderbird 1.5 improved a lot in usability. Most of things getting you “feel right” now.

The referral is only for Windows users, who previously never install Firefox in his/her PC, install and run the Firefox at the first time.

Get Mozilla Firefox, no matter you will help me earning some little cash or not. Get it, it’s for your own enjoying web surfing.

On the other hand, probably I didn’t search hard enough for the right key (I don’t bother to do key remapping yet on my iBook). Use Command + Shift + {{ or }} is simply damn painful and inconvenient. Mozilla Firefox works sweet with Alt + 1, 2, 3… for the respective tabs opened. I use Adium as the basic IM client on Mac OS X, so it has the same shortcut key for multiple chat windows. So Firefox score +1.

Asa Dotzler has some brief info of what are fixed of this RC2 since RC1. And if you wonder why it shows Firefox 1.5 instead of Firefox 1.5 RC2 after the auto-update or manually installation, he has an explanation too.

If you stay tune at the Firebird mailing list as I, you would hear people asking time by time: when Mozilla is going to take action to settle the name conflict? Mozilla renamed its browser application, previously named Phoenix, to Firebird on April 2003. It has been brought concern to Firebird database community that the name conflict is hurting their promotion of the database server. Anyhow, it’s been promised Mozilla would take Firebird as an internal codename for the project and to rename it later in their release. Hence the rebranding. Hope this end the story. peace.

The laid-off is sad for the people involved, there are still jobs out there for these smart people and some would continue the commitment towards Mozilla development. The impact would be more on the Mozilla group, because Netscape isn’t paying developers to develop Mozilla anymore. According to CNet News

The layoffs come as the loose Mozilla.org group, which had overseen the open-source development efforts of the Mozilla browser, transforms itself into a nonprofit foundation. The foundation is funded in large part by a $2 million donation from AOL and $300,000 from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.

Mitchell Baker, who will be president of the new Mozilla Foundation, said the group would use part of its seed funding to hire “a core group of people,” which would include project managers and “key technical contributors” to the open-source project. Some of those people are expected to come from Netscape’s ranks. A broad group of independent volunteers and staffers at other companies are expected to continue working on the open-source browser effort, however.

It’s time to cut the link between Netscape and Mozilla, it’s time for some group to stand up and promote Mozilla for end user (which the role Netscape used to play).

Here’s the new features quoted from its release note:

• Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use “windows integrated security”.
• Mozilla’s bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
• Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
• Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a “delete junk mail” menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
• Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
• Users can now specify “blank page,” “home page,” or “Last page visited” for each of first window, new window and new tab.
• Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML mail compose.
• Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can “view image” to see blocked or not loaded images.
• “Launch file” after downloading has been enabled for .exe files
• It is possible to build Mozilla for Win32 using GCC. See the win32 build instructions for details.
• Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented
• Mozilla 1.4 contains thousands of additional bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.

Another Mozilla book, Creating Applications with Mozilla, was published around 9 months ago, which is also available on-line. Great to see more Mozilla books published, it did help to create more Mozilla-powered application. As Mozilla isn’t just a browser, it’s more than a browser, it’s a framework.

What is Mozilla Firebird anyway? First of all, Mozilla is actually refer to a suite of browser softwares that including a Web Browser, Mail & News application and Chatting application. It’s an Open Source project, along the way of development, the development effort has forked quite a number of different project under its name (Mozilla). For example, tools helping software development: Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai. Mozilla Firebird, previously named Phoenix, is one of the Mozilla projects. It is a standalone browser, with redesign of Mozilla’s browser component.

Comments/Experience from people trying out Mozilla or switched to

Noted most of the following links are copied from adot’s notblog. Thanks for the effort and ping, adot! :)

• Fazal Majid: Kicking the tires on Firebird
• Kevin: Mozilla’s Firebird Browser
• Temperantia R3: A Pleasant Surprise
• Mozilla Firebird v0.6: I have a new default web browser
• Firebird 0.6
• Christopher Taylor
• Mozilla Firebird is ready to rock
• Dave Seidel: Firebird Sweet
• Micah Alpern: Spending some time with Firebird
• Simon: Browser trivia
• Mouse Gestures, Mozilla Firebird
• Tom Pierce
• John Udell: Mozilla on the move
• A Better Browser

7. Font resizing
Mozilla is a clear winner over IE on resizing the text size of viewing web pages. You might have encountered many situations where IE can’t resize the eye-hurting font size properly. Mozilla handle that better and give you more scale on resizing.

8. Security
One day, you might find your IE behave weird:

• Scenario 1: when you fire up your favor browser IE, it’s like taking forever to load before you could place the cursor on address bar and type URL. Then it goes on as usual. Once you close it and re-open, it came again. You hate it, it’s damn annoying.
• Scenario 2: you forgot what application you have installed recently, and can’t recall which websites you’ve been surfed over yesterday. But starting today, harddisk used to be busy when PC connected to Internet. The connection icon sit at systray stay blue all the time, you wonder what the hell is going on.

You are getting parasites. It could be checked by pointing your IE to here. As it explained parasites:

‘Parasite’ is a shorthand term for “unsolicited commercial software” — that is, a program that gets installed on your computer which you never asked for, and which does something you probably don’t want it to, for someone else’s profit.

Many parasites installed their softwares through IE’s ActiveX installation option. It could be avoid by carefully answer the popup question from websites, or guard it by always ensure you got latest patches/updates from Microsoft, or protected with third party software. However, most people are ignorant of these tactic. And that put IE users under higher risk to get those annoying parasites, which waste your CPU power, and even worse, make your surfing uncomfortable.

Mozilla? It’s out of this mess.

9. Users’ voice heard
You sure would gain better control over the browser with Mozilla. And you could join the community if you like. Lots of thing you could do though you aren’t technical savvy: test beta product, sending bug report…etc. If you act politely and do your homework, the community would give you the best support you’d ever have, much better quality, and faster than the paid support. Paid support? You ask. “But IE is free?” You did paid, don’t you. Remember, *it’s part of the OS*.

10. Last, but not least, is the overall improved experience
Using Mozilla is in fact, kind of learning process. It giving you a different view of the world. Alright, you couldn’t care less, it’s OK. If other reasons is enough for you to try it out, you’d feel like to stay with it. There might still have websites where the web developer is too Microsoft-minded, so it was designed only for IE. That you could keep the option to use IE just for the purpose, for example, your internet banking site.

Let alone the settlement between Microsoft and AOL, if you are using Internet Explorer, that means you are missing a better Internet experience with missing Mozilla. What’s Mozilla? you ask.. you’re just using whatever come with Windows.…Well, with little effort to download and install an alternative browser (Mozilla), it’d make your life easier and improve the surfing experience.

Why switch?
You might already heard about Mozilla, and think it’s just a geek tool since lot of geek has switched to using it. Nope, with Mozilla, you could do things IE need extra effort (plugins, third-party tools) to achieve. It isn’t only benefit to computer geeks or web designers/developers (yeah, I know how you feel, who cares about standard compliant, CSS….blah blah). Here’s the top 6 reasons to switch, top 6 reasons for you as a normal browser users:

1. Popup Blocking: you hate the annoying popup windows, aren’t you? Mozilla let users in control of how they want their tool behave. You could block popup windows at all or specify allowed sites to popup. In addition, you are in control of what Javascript could do to your browser, preventing those naughty jscript to resize your browser, lowering it.…etc.
2. Block Image from: Even though you’ve been used to eye skipping the ad banners, you’re still suffering the unwanted images which occupied your 56K (modem) bandwidth. Mozilla let you block images from certain sites, for example you could block most images from certain heavy-ad sites.
3. Tab Browsing: Multi-sites surfing in one windows, easy navigation by Ctrl-tab, raising new sites in bookmark to tab.….lots of tips to help you manage the windows appearing, thus saving space on your taskbar.
4. Accessibility: Typing Ctrl-L, Alt-D quick access to location bar, Ctrl-K for Google bar, specify your favaorite search engine and access them directly from location bar. You could search any words in page by typing straight away.
5. Password Management: Secured and helpful password manager, no more hassle to keep all sites’ password in somewhere else…it’s all here in Mozilla
6. Faster, More responsive, and prettier: Mozilla load and render the page faster, you’d feel it’s more responsive in day in day out using it. At last, it did render the page more beautiful! By simpler UI and more space, it give you better viewing, especially in Windows XP (Is it just me? I got to admit this is my very personal experience).

It’s isn’t about Open Source, not better web standard support, Mozilla is just simply better.

In a rush to somewhere else, to be continued.

One key reason I switched totally from IE/Opera to Mozilla was its rendering. My usual platform is Windows XP/NT4, and I always feel the web page looks nicer under Mozilla, especially the fonts. Not sure if this is only happen to me, I do enjoy it a lot.

Joel also switch.