Thunderbird and Firefox

Being the update junkie that I am, I just had to go and update Firefox and Thunderbird to their latest versions (0.9 and 0.7 respectively) as they were released. My initial feel of both is positive, but I do have my issues.

Firefox was a breeze to update yesterday, especially with its new Linux installer. I’ve always liked installing applications that don’t require you to reboot after installing it. The Windows install wasn’t that easy. Of course, I guess I should have read the release notes before I upgraded. Now I have a dangling reference to 0.8 in the Add or Remove Programs dialog. I must admit though, it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last time I have dangling referenes to old versions around. Such is life in Windows land…

The new theme in Firefox doesn’t feel as good as the previous one, but I understand the need to change because of licensing issues. I would presume that this is something that will still be worked on while moving from 0.9 to 1.0. The extension manager is a dream compared to the previous versions. But it was interesting to note that while Linux offered to install certain extensions during the install, the Windows installer didn’t allow this. The Web Developer toolbar and menu is really nice. And one wonders why I didn’t have it installed before? Plugins didn’t get migrated automatically, but the reason for this is that at least in Linux the location of the settings directory changed. Again, one should read the release notes more carefully.

The shift to Thunderbird 0.7 this morning (half an hour ago) wasn’t as painless. There’s still no installer for Linux so some manual labour was needed. The main problem that I had was that my old settings didn’t migrate. The release notes point out that the profile path (onLinux) is ~/.thunderbird/default/xxxxxxxx.slt. And that is were I had my previous settings saved already. There was a hint though… I had to create a new bogus mail account when initially starting up Thunderbird. Once this was done I noticed that I now had a directory ~/.thunderbird/default.raz which contained the profile. Delete the contents of that directory and copy everything I had in the previous profile directory and I was set to go.

Both app’s now have a extensions directory in the profiles, this should make upgrading and deleting extension files much easier in the future. Download them and take a spin, I promise that you won’t be disappointed.