Favorite Web and Email Tools

First, let's get one thing clear. Microsoft has not made the Web what it is today. They totally missed the importance of the Internet, they still don't understand it and they're deathly afraid of the fact the Web makes the user's computer operating system irrelevant. The company that made this obvious was Netscape. Netscape is gone now as a company but the technology has evolved through the open source Mozilla Foundation; the dinosaur became the bird.

There is no better web browser than the Mozilla Firefox browser. One of its biggest benefits is the elimination of unwanted pop-up windows without requiring the user to install an add-on "popup blocker" that is itself a piece of spyware. A web developer working without Firefox is basically working in the dark. Microsoft has made it where you can't uninstall Internet Explorer but you can install Firefox and make it your default browser. Do it today!

The single biggest threat to email as we know it today is Microsoft's Outlook Express email client. It is responsible for the distribution of 99% of the trojans and viruses that plague modern computing. Uninstall Outlook immediately then get Mozilla's Thunderbird and make it your default mail and news reader. It won't keep you from being an idiot and running unknown programs attached to messages you receive but it will not execute arbitrary programs on its own. A big feature I use daily is Thunderbird's Junk Mail filter. It deals with the spam that isn't caught by my mail hosts' filters by collecting it up in a Junk folder, the content of which I can forward to the mail providers so they can better tune their filters.

If you'd like the best of browsing, email and news along with a web page editor then you can still get the combined product, commonly refered to just as Mozilla. In general I prefer it that way, too, but I took the time to switch to Firefox/Thunderbird and now I kind of like the fact they can be updated separately at their own speed. One of the primary benefits to open source software is that there is no rush to market pressure so things get fixed as needed and features are not added until they are probably ready to work correctly.