Mozilla Firefox is an excellent cross-platform browser available for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. It is open source and can be expanded with a lot of plug ins, many of which are free. In fact it could be seen as an operating system within an operating system. And it is not tied to a large corporation with great interest in tracking all your personal information, interests and habits.
Among the most ‘must-have’ plug-ins to install immediately after a Firefox installation in my view are:
- an add blocker to limit the number of irritating advertisements the Internet subjects you to, such as Ad Block Plus,
- a download helper to simplify and speed up downloads, and potentially also use templates for naming the downloaded files to simplify your archiving, such as DownThemAll,
- and potentially a down-loader of video clips, such as Video Download Helper.
Thunderbird is another offering from the Mozilla foundation. It is a full fledged local email client which allows you to read email on either POP or IMAP email servers but also to store and archive your emails locally. It can be extended with the same or plug-ins, one of the best of which is Lighting, a calendar application. Thunderbird includes a reasonably good address book which includes for example being able to have separate address books, and adding pictures of your contacts into the address book. It can import and export data to VCF files.
I-m probably still very old school, but I do not like to leave my emails on the Microsoft, Google or other external service provider emails where they essentially can be used to collect information on your developing interest and could be vulnerable to a single large scale hack. Copying them to my local drive, making sure I do back them up regularly to external media, simply is a much more secure solutions. So I am hoping that Mozilla will continue to support further development of Thunderbird and Lighting and do expect that other programs will eventually gain traction again to compete with Outlook and with web-mail such as Google.com an Outlook.com.
The two most critical plug-ins for Thunderbird are:
- Lighting, a standards compliant calendar which can provide you with multiple calendars in parallel either from ICS standard files or by synchronizing with e.g. a Google calendar,
- A plug in to occasionally check for duplicate addresses in your address books and merge them.
SeaMonkey could be described as a single browser and local email client rolled into one. Similar to Firefox and Thunderbird it can be extended with plugins and the look and feel changed with themes. The main advantage for some is that you can browse and track emails within the same, monolithic, application.
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
SeaMonkey: https://www.seamonkey-project.org/