I switched! Again. And again…
No, this isn’t an Apple “Switch” commercial. But close. I never thought I’d run Netscape (mozilla)browsers again. I used to hate IE back in the day and would only run Netscape. Then I think around IE4, I crossed over to IE and started to ease away from Netscape. The feel of Netscape became painful. When I had to test software browser applications, I cringed when having to use NS4.7. Uuugh. Hated it.
What made me switch? One thing I don’t like about IE is the fact that it’s all SDI. Strange isn’t it? In the Win3.1 timeframe, everything was MDI and then people started switching to the SDI. Office was one of the worst offenders I found. For example, If I’m editing 3 word documents, do I want 3 instances of MS Word to appear in the taskbar? When I’ve got browser windows, email clients, folder windows, cmd prompts and whatever else, my taskbar is FULL. I don’t need Word to add an additional 2 entries. One is fine, thanks. I’ll ctrl-tab between documents. Same with IE. I don’t know anyone who only has one browser going when working. I’ve usually got at least 4 at any time.
So this led me recently to search for a browser that offered me the same thing. I tried Netscape 6 briefly as well as Opera a while back, but didn’t give them much time. The past 4 months or so, I’ve been using Slimbrowser which does a really good job with the MDI interface. And it has some really neat extra features. Even when I found a bug, I emailed it in and immediately had a response and it was fixed promptly in the next release. Then, this week I installed Mozilla on my Linux machine and was impressed with the way you can open multiple tabs via middle button click and force them to the background while they’re still loading. And I’d been looking for better features from a mail client as well. When I tried to switch back from Outlook Express to Outlook XP at work, I couldn’t stand some of the limitations on Outlook when trying to use multiple email accounts and even the mail filtering rules. After about 10 minutes I switched back to OEX again. So when I installed Mozilla on my work machine for the browser, I tried out the mail client as well. So far so good, lets hope it stays that way. I don’t want to be switching anymore. Although if Slimbrowser puts in some of the features I like in Mozilla, I might switch again. 