In 1997, Bill Gates made a visit to Barnes and Noble. He wasn’t buying books, he was visiting with the guys who ran BarnesAndNoble.com. After that meeting, they switched from their Solaris-based platform to Microsoft servers.
I was working at Firefly in 1997 and Barnes and Noble was our current big customer. To keep our big customer happy, we had to port our software to Windows NT to make it work for BarnesAndNoble. To get that done, I needed to get a PC and soon one showed up on my desk at work, previously only inhabited by a Mac and a terminal window.
So I guess I can claim that Bill Gates directly caused my switch to a PC for my primary work machine. I resisted it at first, but after a while I started to see that some of the apps were better, notably Internet Explorer. It was faster and crashed less than Netscape. Later when I went to work at Microsoft, it was a no-brainer – everything was Microsoft software. I swore I would never use another crappy Netscape product again.
That’s the way it remained for quite a few years – until very recently. Outlook, then Outlook Express wasn’t cutting it for my email needs, so I went looking and found Mozilla (nee Netscape) Thunderbird, which is a pretty good email client. That’s been working out pretty well for the last few months.
Even more recently, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 0.8, the latest rename and version of their open-source next-generation browser. I gave it a try and quickly found it very well done. I began to use it more and more until I decided to make the switch – I made it my default browser.
There’s a few issues with some websites (mostly ones I wrote!), but for the most part, it’s become my preferred PC browser at home and at work. Tabbed browsing is great, it’s fast, and compatible. Search integration is cool. Type-ahead find is amazing.
The intial versions of Mozilla (and Netscape 6 and 7) were horrible, slow, bloated apps that crashed often. Firefox and Thunderbird seem to be a great step in a new direction and I think they’re finally ready for primetime.
I recently made a similar switch. Searching is so much faster in thunderbird then in outlook. The only thing I’d like changed in firefox is to have it open new tabs instead of windows. For example, when I click on a url in a 3rd party app, I’d like it to open a new tab, even though the other app requests a new window.
Chad,
Try TabBrowser Extensions at http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/
Under Advanced options -> Window Mode -> “Single Window Mode”. Customize away.
Thunderbird/Firefox makes a great combination.
Hope this helps,
Dave