As Linux users, we're not subjected to the horrible world of browsing the web with IE. Frankly, we don't know why
anyone CHOOSES to do so! In typical Micro$oft fashion, they steal ideas and innovations from others and then try
to claim them as their own, touting them as "new" features! Why do people fall for this nonsense?
Anyway, if you're interested in experiencing browser innovations from the people who actually came up with them,
treat yourself to one of the Mozilla family of browsers. Firefox is a standalone browser, Thunderbird
is a standalone e-mail/news client. My favorite, SeaMonkey, started out as the Mozilla Suite. It contains a browser,
e-mail/newsgroup client, and a web page composer. Camino is a standalone browser for Mac OSX.
We're on Linux, but there are versions of Mozilla browsers for all major operating systems--and they're all free!
We've put together some graphics that illustrate some of Mozilla's features. Take a look so you can see what
you're missing if you're still using IE. One of the greatest features of all Mozilla products is the
ability
to customize the heck out of them by use of extensions. These are small add-ons you can install
directly
from the Mozilla site, and there are hundreds of them available. There are extensions available to
do things
that may have never even occurred to you! Check out the SeaMonkey extensions or the
Firefox extensions
pages to see all the amazing things you can add to your browser.
The snapshot below illustrates the e-mail/newsgroup client included with SeaMonkey. Note the different
colors in the message--that's a function of the quote colors extension. As with all aspects of Mozilla
software, it's highly customizable; you can choose the colors you want for each level of quoting in a message.
In our example, the original poster's comments are in green, the first person to reply is in orange, the second
person who replied is in purple, and the third person's comments are in black. This makes keeping track of
highly-quoted messages a breeze.
Once you've realized what you've been missing and are ready to explore Mozilla-based browsers for yourself, you can visit
Mozilla.org for more information and to download the FREE software.
