Fire and Thunder

Decided to take the plunge on my work machine and dump Mozilla in favor of running FireFox and Thunderbird as my browser and mail client respectively. Both are based off the Mozilla development line but are focused on making the smallest tightest version of each one. I’ve been a long time user/fan of Mozilla primarily because of all the neat plug-ins/extensions being built. Making this split allowed me to find a few new ones along the way.

First off, I am a web developer both professionally and as a hobby. No web developer should be without the Live HTTP headers extension so you can see what request and response headers are being sent for a page request. The next must have is Web Developer; too many useful tools in this package including the ability to validate the HTML, links, etc. of a page you are viewing.

For day-to-day use, you can’t live without Mouse Gestures; forget moving all the way up to the top of the browser window to navigate. With a quick flick of the wrist, you are going back and forth between pages. Want to search for just about anything? Use MyCroft; a handy toolbar allows you to switch between searching for something on Google, eBay, Amazon, IMDB, etc. Handy dictionary extensions let you highlight a word on a page and find the definition for it.

The most recent one I’m excited about is Moji. No need to go to the fish to try to translate a page just for a word or two in Japanese; open up the Moji sidebar, highlight the kanji, and press a button. Poof! The translation is provided.

Anyhoo, I’ll see if both apps perform any better than running Mozilla for web and mail. So far, the memory consumption of both is slightly below Mozilla, but we’ll see if that changes after a full day’s use. Probably will stick with Mozilla on the home box until both reach a fully stable 1.X release. I am such a geek… :)