G
Greg Schmidt
And if I want to just quickly look up something on the Web, and I don't
want to read mail. (Which might be once a month.)
I do that several times a day.
I just never have warmed up to the concept foisted upon us by Microsoft
of needing one application for one thing and another, for another. When
I see this in my mind I think of IE/OE.
Never used OE, but isn't it an email/news client bundled into one?
And here we have the folks a Mozilla trying to foist the same concept
down my throat. I keep hearing at some pont down the road Moz will be
abandoned and you'll have to roll your own putting bits and pieces
together and hope for the best.
I rather like the idea that I can pick the browser that best suits me,
and the email client that best suits me, and the news reader that best
suits me. In my experience, applications are usually good at no more
than one thing. Anything else that it tries to provide lacks critical
features and feels tacked on. Note that I haven't used Moz for email,
just browsing.
When I go on the Internet, I read and save my mail, I read my
newsgroups. And, once I do this, I do my web surfing should I need to.
I think that your experience may be different from the majority, but
that could simply be because it's so different from mine, and we all
have a tendency to project ourselves onto the masses.
If I see a mailto link in a URL I like simply clicking on it and I am
instantly creating an email message. If I see a URL of interest in an
email I go instantly to the URL.
Should your word processor have a browser embedded in it, so that URLs
clicked in documents (manuals, for example) open immediately? How about
embedding a word processor (or at least word processor document viewer)
into your browser, for URLs that take you to those files?
In either case I don't have to wait for
another application to open and I don't take up more RAM by opening
another another program.
Well, you're taking up the RAM one way or another. If it's all one app,
then it's going to be a larger app. A stand-alone browser will launch
faster than a browser-email-news app will, and launch time is important
to me.
Also when I click on a mailto unlike in FF which opens Mozilla to a
Blank URL page then pops open a blank email screen (ready to create the
email). If I click on a Mailto in Mozilla it instantly goes to the blank
email page. I've set the system properly to open TB in FF for Mailto:,
But it always opens Mozilla.
That sounds like flawed implementation, not an inherent weakness of
separate apps.
So if Moz is abandoned I guess I'll have to look around for an another
all in one.
And I'll be able to scratch it from my list of browsers that I only have
installed in order to check my pages.
Please, don't feel that I'm picking you apart with all of those
comments. Your experiences are valid, I'm just providing a view of
things from someone with different experiences.
Now, for an alternative that might make us both (and many others) happy.
Browsers already support plugins for things like Flash, Acrobat, etc. I
don't see any technological reason why they couldn't also provide hooks
for email, news, and other plugins.(1)
Then, the makers of Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, and all the myriad
other email clients could make a plugin so that they could be used
"inside" Firefox, Opera, etc. Ditto for news readers. You would pick
the browser, email, news, and whatever other apps you liked, and they'd
all play together happily.
You could set it to load all plugins on launch, or on demand, depending
on whether you wanted it to start fast and lean, or have all
functionality instantly available on-demand.
Ideally, although this seems unlikely, the hooks would be standardized,
so that each provider would only have to write one plugin, not one for
each different browser.
(1) There's no compelling reason why it would have to be the browsers
that would provide this. However, they are perhaps best positioned to
do it, and since so many people discovered the internet through browsers
there may be a comfort factor. In fact, the more I think about it, the
more I like it. The plugins wouldn't even have to provide an interface
of any kind, they could work completely in HTML that the browser renders
(which also happens to make cross-platform plugin development easier).
If they could all agree on CSS IDs and classes to use for particular
types of things, you could even slap a personalized look-and-feel onto
all of your plugins at once by updating your local style sheet.