#1 of the 10 Computer Apps Murray Can’t Live Without

Technology Stuff

Here’s my start of a list of the 10 computer apps I can’t live without. I try to keep them both Mac and PC, but some are not cross platform compatible, anyway – here we go! Check back for the rest, next week is a really good one!

1. Seamonkey

What the heck a Seamonkey is anyway?   Mozilla (remember Netscape Navigator?) named this app after the real thingMozilla  is an “open source” community that provides such better-known apps as the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client. Seamonkey is cool because it has a Firefox like browser, a Thunderbird like email client AND a built in WYSIWYG HTML editor, an IRC chat client, a news group client, and an easy to use address book (download links below).

There are so many advantages of using Mozilla apps over especially the Microsoft apps (Internet Explorer and Outlook), the biggest being security. You have a lot better chance of avoiding being the target of malicious emails and web viruses by using Mozilla products. Sad but true, hackers most often target Microsoft products. That’s reason enough to switch, isn’t it? Add to that the ease of use and stability of Mozilla, and you’re nuts (sorry) for using IE or OE!

As part-time web page designers and developers, we have another huge reason not to use IE – we hate it. It is the biggest single source of coding headaches in the universe. Developers can code all day long and have their web content work just fine – as long as they don’t view it in IE. We are forced to throw “conditional comments” into the code to have our beautifully coded work “work” right with IE. So, throw out IE (please!!!) and coding for the web would be a trillion times more efficient and simple.

Currently, the browser market share looks something like this.
October 2011:  IE-22.4%, Firefox-40.6%, Chrome-30.3%, Safari -3.8%, Opera-2.3%

* Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

That’s 22.4% for IE (boo), and you can figure out the rest (yeah!). What’s it mean? IE is loosing market share to the good browsers. Mozilla has zoomed ahead in the last couple of years, and Chrome, Google’s new browser, is sure to bite even more into that market share very quickly.

Where does Seamonkey fit in? Seamonkey’s browser looks, feels and behaves much the same as Firefox, it works great, but seems to have just a few more issues with certain web sites that develop only for the major browsers (IE, Firefox, etc.). We use both Seamonkey and when we need to – Firefox, but you could use both Firefox and Thunderbird like a lot of folks do just as easily as you use IE and Outlook Express, with a lot less stress, a lot more efficiency, and way more fun.

Well there you go, now go get it – because its there!

Seamonkey download page (look for the correct version for your OS):
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/

Or if you prefer Firefox:
Mac OSX: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html
Windows: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5.5&os=win?=en-US

Thunderbird:
Mac OSX: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/download/?product=thunderbird-2.0.0.23&os=osx?=en-US
Windows: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/download/?product=thunderbird-2.0.0.23&os=win?=en-US


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