How to get rid of Mozilla.

Posted on By pukeko

I have used firefox and its products for years. My favourite tool for bibliography — zotero — started out as a firefox plugin. My mail reader of choice has been, for years, thunderbird.

But… I find myself horrifed with the board of Mozilla, and in agreement with Andrew Sullivan.

The guy who had the gall to express his First Amendment rights and favor Prop 8 in California by donating $1,000 has just been scalped by some gay activists. After an OKCupid decision to boycott Mozilla, the recently appointed Brendan Eich just resigned under pressure:

In a post at Mozilla’s official blog, executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker confirmed the news with an unequivocal apology on the company’s behalf. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” Baker wrote. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

The action comes days after dating site OKCupid became the most vocal opponent of Eich’s hiring. Mozilla offered repeated statements about LGBT inclusivity within the company over the past two weeks, but those never came with a specific response from Eich about his thousands of dollars of donations in support of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that sought to ban gay marriage in the state.

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

For those of you who do not follow the US political blogoverse, the Sullivan is quite gay, and quite the gay activist. But he is a man of courage, and is prepared to stand up to bullies, even if they are nominally on his side. Good on him.

But there are consequences. Firstly, I have chromium and opera installed — chromium is good — so I managed to get rid of firefox and thunderbird.
Screenshot - 04042014 - 06:20:25 PM

Now, the heavyweight method to replace mozilla products is very easy.

Use either Chromium or (if you do not mind closed source) Opera. Both are fully fledged web browsers. Both will do most jobs — I’m using Chromium to write this.

And for email, use Evolution. This will link with almost everything — including Windows Mail Servers — and is probably the best solution if you have to use corporate versions.

If you do this, Do install bogofilter, spamassassin and highlight. The first two keep the nasties from your eyes, and the last allows you to mark things up.

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Lightweight is a little more difficult. As far as I can see, the best lightweight email client for linuxen is claws-mail. It does not set things up automatically, and it is text based, but it is fast, fast, fast. The pure unix geeks would recommend you use Mutt or Alpine, but that is a little too text based.

I have a soft spot for epiphany; it just works and it is not that extendible. For simple browsing, it rocks. Arora is an alternative. But, on old machines, I would stick with those two.

But it is time to boycott mozilla. Finally, zotero standalone is available in the AUR for arch, and is not browser specific.

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Update.

I have been working on getting a lightweight ultrabook ready for travel this week. To do this I installed Manjaro (which works well), uninstalled firefox and thunderbird, and installed epiphany, rekonq (instead of chromium) and geary (instead of claws-mail). Geary is a lightweight mail client, but it has a simple interface: claws is much more powerful.

And the twits are getting worse.

6 thoughts on “How to get rid of Mozilla.”

  1. I already have Mozilla on my computers, but I also still have IE, and mostly use it, anyway. 🙂

    1. Try opera. Seriously. It’s a lot faster and a lot more stable. A lot of the programs I use are web based, such as strut or google docs, and they don’t play nicely with IE, but do with Opera or Google Chrome, if you are in the microsoft ecosystem.

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