Spontaneous Monotony

Mozilla’s proposed abandonment of the Thunderbird mail client is beginning to unravel at the seams. The plan was to spin-off Thunderbird to a separate Thunderbird Mail Corporation. Mozilla has formed the company and even hired a CEO, but (in what is either a show of dissent or a coincidence of truly epic proportions) the only two full-time Thunderbird developers have announced their resignations. So Thunderbird will have its shiny new ghetto to ‘get more attention’, but won’t actually have anyone to give it that attention. Congratulations Mozilla - you just killed a very promising project

I’m writing this from the Alpha 4 version of ‘Gran Paradiso’, the traditionally pretentious codename for the next version of Firefox. Now, before downloading you are presented with the usual warnings, a whole pile of legalese which amounts to ‘if you use this software then you will definitely be eaten by rabid squirrels’. They even went to the trouble of posting download links to files that don’t exist, so that you have to hunt through the FTP server to download the thing.

I have to say though, on initial inspection I’m very impressed. It is lightning quick compared to Firefox 2. I haven’t noticed this much of a speed difference between browsers since I switched from IE6 to Firebird 0.4 way back when. That may of course be because all but one of my extensions (Adblock Plus is the black sheep) only work with version 2.x of Firefox - maybe I won’t bother reinstalling as many when Firefox 3 gets its final release (or when these evil weevil bugs catch up with me and I go back to Firefox 2?). Anyway, if this is the future of Firefox, roll on the future!

EDIT: Well that didn’t take long. All working fine until the CSS styling on PvXWiki didn’t work, and then two sites (one of which was Guild Wars Guru Auction) just wouldn’t load at all. Still, once they get minor bugs like refusing to load webpages sorted out, those speed increases will be brilliant