Firefox and Thunderbird tips

Like many people, I often use Mozilla’s browser and email client, but find that without some customisation, they are not to my liking.

The first task is to get them both to fit into my desktop environment. Since I use the Tango icons, using the Tango Firefox theme and Thunderbird theme is only natural. Note that Thunderbird will crash if you have the mail notification feature enabled, so best disable that.

Then some settings must be added in about:config, so that both programs can talk to each other. Open about:config in Firefox, right click and add network.protocol-handler.app.mailto. Set it to xdg-email and it will now open up whichever email program you set as default 😀 (make sure that you have emerged xdg-utils otherwise xdg-* won’t exist)

A similar method exists for Thunderbird. Edit => Preferences => Advanced => Config Editor… will get you to the about:config equivalent. Then add network.protocol-handler.app.http and network.protocol-handler.app.https and set both to xdg-open. Now when you click on links in Thunderbird, they should open up in your browser.

Then you get onto extensions. Now, I don’t use an excessive number, just a few that I have found useful.

In Firefox the ones I recommend are:

• All-In-One Gestures to let me have control of many browser featuress by just moving the mouse
• omploader, adds ‘Ompload!’ to the right click menu, allowing you to easily upload any file type to omploaer
• Finally, not one that I am using currently, but one that is certainly very interesting is vimperator which makes Firefox behave like the best editor in the world, Vim :>

In Thunderbird I use:

• enigmail, for all my PGP needs
• moztraybiff, which adds a system-tray icon for Thunderbird that notes how many new messages you have

Hopefully somebody will find some of this useful :p