Firefox and Thunderbird Garage

by Hofmann, Chris; Knous, Marcia; Hedtke, John

• ISBN13: 9780131870048
• ISBN10: 0131870041
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-04-08
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

HOT! Firefox and Thunderbird - made even better with insider tips and tricks from Mozilla's development team!

Author Biography

About the Authors

Chris Hofmann is Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation. For eight years, he worked at Netscape and was involved in every Netscape and Mozilla Browser release since Netscape 3.01. In August 2003 he was hired as the first employee at the Mozilla Foundation and spent the first 18 months in startup mode, working with the small team that has been successful in getting the Mozilla Foundation off the ground and running as a independent and self-sustaining organization and continuing to organize the work of thousands of open source contributors to make great Internet software. In 2004, he contributed a wide variety of management efforts that led to the worldwide release of Firefox 1.0 in November, and is helping to fulfill the Mozilla Foundation's goal of continuing to support open web standards and provide innovation and choice for Internet client software.

Marcia Knous is a Project Manager at the Mozilla Foundation and has been working with the Mozilla Project for five years. She is involved with both the Firefox and Thunderbird projects. In the freelance realm, she is a frequent contributor to a number of online websites, including http://www.fanstop.com, where she writes a weekly NFL column called Monday Night Musings. In addition, she has written dozens of online articles about the historical contributions women have made to the world of sports. Marcia has a Masters in Cinema-Television and enjoys working on films in her spare time. She recently wrapped up cinematography on the documentary Common Hours. Born and raised in the splendid confines of New England, Marcia now resides in the Bay Area.

John Hedtke has written 24 books, close to 100 magazine articles, and hundreds of manuals and online help systems for all kinds of technical and non-technical documentation for all levels of readers. John owns and operates a company that provides writing, consulting, and training services to private and government clients in all fields. He also speaks to professional groups all over the world on subjects such as career planning, time management, and writing books and magazine articles. John is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. In his spare time, John writes buttons for a button company in California, donates blood, and sings and plays banjo and guitar (something he's been doing since 1971). He says he gets a lot of requests when he plays the banjo, but he goes ahead and plays it anyhow. A long-time resident of Seattle, John now lives in Eugene, OR, with his amazingly patient wife, Marilyn, where they share four cats. He can be reached through his website, http://www.hedtke.com.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

About the Authors	xi
Foreword	xiii
Acknowledgments	xvii
Introduction	xix
PART 1 FIREFOX	1	(168)
1 Getting Started	3	(26)
2 Protecting Your Security and Privacy	29	(24)
3 Ridding Yourself of the Annoyances of the Web	53	(8)
4 Searching the Web	61	(22)
BLOG Websites to Waste Your Time With	73	(10)
5 Bookmarks and History	83	(24)
6 Harnessing the Power of Tabbed Browsing	107	(10)
7 Customizing Firefox with Third-Party Extensions and Themes	117	(30)
BLOG Managing Your Blog with Extensions	145	(2)
8 Other Interesting Features	147	(22)
BLOG Literary Blogs Through the Ages	165	(4)
PART 2 MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD	169	(104)
9 Getting Started with Mozilla Thunderbird	171	(16)
10 Setting Up Your Mail, RSS, and Newsgroup Accounts Using Mozilla Thunderbird	187	(32)
11 Protecting Your Privacy and Blocking Spam	219	(18)
BLOG Phishing	233	(4)
12 Organizing Your Email Topics	237	(18)
BLOG My Email Tirade of the Day	251	(4)
13 Customizing the Look and Feel of Mozilla Thunderbird	255	(18)
A Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts for Firefox	273	(20)
B Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts for Mozilla Thunderbird	293	(6)
C Menu Commands for Firefox	299	(8)
D Menu Commands for Mozilla Thunderbird	307	(8)
E Hacking Configuration Files	315	(6)
F Security, Certificates, and Validation	321	(12)
Glossary	333	(6)
Index	339

Excerpts

Forword ForwordThe Internet has become central to our lives-itrs"s how we communicate, find, and share information with colleagues, friends, and family. It has permeated the fabric of our lives to the point where its enticements can now be found on prominent display on television, print media, movies, and any other form of advertising you care to think of. The Internet has grown so rapidly and taken such a hold, not just because of its fundamental utility, but also because of the ease of which people are able to make use of it. In the 1980s, for the first time computer software evolved to a point where it was possible for ordinary people to transmit and receive information through networks. The early 1990s followed with the development of the World Wide Web and software designed to navigate it-web browsers. The rich nature of the web with its graphics, flexible presentation options, and open construction made it easy for people to connect, contribute, and benefit. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, software vendors have focused on making connecting to the Internet as simple as possible. They have had a large degree of success. In 2002, the CIArs"sThe World Factbookestimated 159 million Internet users in the United States alone.With so many people using the Internet and the technology behind computers still being something of a mystery to most of us, in the past few years, Internet users came under attack. Computers began to slow down and crash. Data was lost or, even worse, stolen. The web experience began to degrade as more and more sites began showing popup windows with advertising. Junk email was on the rise. It became harder and harder to get value out of the Internet when much of peoplers"s time was spent dealing with this new generation of digital annoyances. The situation was in part due to the open design of the underlying systems-Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express were never intended to be exploited in such ways, in part due to tricks of social engineering and in part due to flaws in the Internet software most people used. Microsoft had won market dominance after several years of fiercely competitive battle with Netscape Communications Corporation and ended up distributing its software to every user of Microsoft Windows, in effect becoming the portal to the Internet for most people.Microsoft designed Internet Explorer to be a developerrs"s paradise, an extensive programming API that allowed for rich content and add-ons to be effortlessly deployed to thousands of users. With the flexibility came a price, however-it was not long before individuals sought to capitalize on usersrs" lack of understanding to foist "spyware" software onto their machines: key loggers, data grabbers, popup ad generators, viruses, and other deviants. Microsoft Outlook suffered a similar set of problems whereby users could inadvertently run malicious programs attached to unsolicited email.One of Netscapers"s last great acts was to open its client development process with the creation of mozilla.org in 1998-the source code of its web browser and email reader would be opened for all to read, understand, and contribute to. Two and a half years after the source release in November of 2000, Netscape released Netscape 6.0 based on the results of this effort to date. The product was exceptionally buggy, slow, and laden with misguided attempts to make a quick buck from browser users. It was a product marketing disaster, and much of the remaining user base abandoned Netscape for Internet Explorer. But the core was solid, and Netscape and the open source community continued to develop the browser over the following years, improving the performance, stability, and features. Security was always important to Netscape and its customers, so the software was designed with a more