As I’ve been reading various discussion groups, it occurs to me that when a user reads that Firefox 1.5.0.1 is out, he/she rushes to the Mozilla website to download it. Sorta puts all that hard work on the update system to waste 
.
Yes, I know the majority of Firefox users probably don’t hang out in technical discussion groups; but still, wherever you see an announcement, let them know that 1.5 users can use Help -> Check for Updates.
Some of you may be aware of my webpage that compares the differences between Mozilla Suite versus Firefox and Thunderbird. With the impending release of SeaMonkey 1.0, I decided to create an equivalent page comparing SeaMonkey against Firefox and Thunderbird. Because SeaMonkey uses the Mozilla 1.8 codebase, I figured the list of differences would shrink; but I was surprised by how much it shrank. This is specifically because one product may have a user interface for a feature, while the other doesn’t.
For instance:
– Scam detection: In Thunderbird, you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Email Scams, and check mark the box. There’s no menu for it in SeaMonkey, but all you need to do is enter about:config in the browser location bar, and search for the pref mail.phishing.detection.enabled. Double-click on it, to toggle between on (true) and off (false).
– Anti-Virus support: In Thunderbird, you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Anti-Virus, and check mark the box. Again, there’s no menu for it in SeaMonkey, but all you need to do is enter about:config in the browser location bar, and add the Boolean pref mailnews.downloadToTempFile. Setting the value to true enables the feature, while setting it to false disables it. (The default is false.)
– Marking Junk as read: In SeaMonkey, go to Tools -> Junk Mail Controls, and for each account, you’ll see a check box for “Mark messages determined to be Junk as read”. The check box isn’t in Thunderbird, but the feature is there. Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General, and click on “Config Editor” (finally, a user-friendly term for aboutconfig). Search for a pref called mail.server.default.markAsReadOnSpam. Copy the name of that pref, and clear the config search field. By looking at your other preference settings, you should be able to determine the server number of the account you want to set the preference for. Once you’ve done that, add an edited version of the Boolean preference you copied, replacing “default” with the server and number of the account you are editing. (eg. mail.server.server2.markAsReadOnSpam ) (Restarting Thunderbird is required)
In case anyone has trouble explaining how to subscribe to newsgroups on the new Mozilla server, I’ve created a few instructional pages. They need some proofreading; so if anyone sees any mistakes, please comment.
news.mozilla.org has now been switched over to Giganews.
Just a quick reminder: The article sequence numbers won’t match between the old news server at AOL and the Giganews server. This means that you will have a wrong count of which messages are read. (Most likely, all messages will be marked as read, as well as many new ones after that.) It would be best to re-subscribe to your current netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups.
Luckily, newsgroups that don’t have a counterpart on the netscape.public.mozilla* hierarchy didn’t have to wait. This means the user support newsgroups are up and running. For the first time ever, there are user support forums on a server actually called “mozilla.org“. 
For more info, read the News Migration FAQ or my Unofficial New Mozilla News Server Information Centre.
In a previous blog entry, I mentioned that on January 4th, the webtools newsgroups/lists would be the ‘guinea pig’. There are some last minute issues, that will require some testing, before the switch is turned, to point news.mozilla.org to the Giganews server. The switchover date has been pushed back to Monday January 9th.
I’ve put together this New Mozilla News Server Information Centre, which should cover any questions people may have about the new news server and newsgroups. It should make for a Happy New Year.
I’ll be offline, until 2006 [EST].
Early next week is when the switch will be turned, to point news.mozilla.org to the Giganews server; but the actual newsgroup transition will happen after that.
Because Giganews contains usenet groups, it already has the netscape.public.mozilla.* hierarchy. When the switch happens, those groups will be available to people accessing the Giganews server via the servername news.mozilla.org. In fact Giganews has had the new groups up and ready since the beginning of October. They’re just not open for access.
After the switch has been made, each new mailing list will be created. There will be an announcement on each mailing list/newsgroup warning subscribers approximately a week in advance of the switch.
Let’s say, for example, you are on the mozilla-qa-general@mozilla.org mailing list, which is bi-directionally mirrored with the newsgroup netscape.public.mozilla.qa.general. When the mozilla-dev-quality@lists.mozilla.org mailing list is created, you will be automatically included on the subscriber list, and Giganews will open the group mozilla.dev.quality for access, at which point subscribers to the netscape.public.mozilla.qa.general newsgroup will have to subscribe manually to mozilla.dev.quality.
If you’d like to see which lists have already been created, you can keep track by visiting https://lists.mozilla.org/.
Right now, netscape.public.mozilla.webtools is the ‘guinea pig’, which will be split into four separate groups. January 4th is the date set for the creation of the mailing lists dev-apps-bugzilla@lists.mozilla.org, dev-apps-webtools@lists.mozilla.org, support-bugzilla@lists.mozilla.org, and support-webtools@lists.mozilla.org, at which point the newsgroups mozilla.dev.apps.bugzilla, mozilla.dev.apps.webtools, mozilla.support.bugzilla, and mozilla.support.webtools will be open for access.
If all goes well with the ‘guinea pig’, the list of available groups will increase shortly thereafter. I’ve been told that after the webtools list is transferred, the rest will happen the following week; but lets all assume a problem or two will arise, and put a buffer week in there.
It’s finally public. See:
http://www.mozilla.org/community/giganews-migration.html
It’s been decided, at least initially, to limit propagation to only GigaNews and Google Groups. We have agreements in place with both services to not propagate messages any further. Based on feedback from the community, this may change at some point in the future, but deciding to allow propagation is an irreversible decision so we’re starting out the “safe” way. 🙂
As for the question of when: The first half of January…..2006. 
Well, I finally did it. A little while ago, I posted about my browser and mailnews FAQs being too big for one page, and that I was considering giving each FAQ item its own page. I contemplated using a content management system, but in the end decided to get rid of template content that I might change, and do it all manually.
I’ve applied these changes to my Netscape 7 Browser FAQ, Netscape 7 Mailnews FAQ, Mozilla Browser FAQ, and Mozilla Mailnews FAQ; so if anyone references those pages, or if you have have a website that contains links to any of the items on those pages, be sure to update your links.
Mozilla will have a new newsgroup server, and a new newsgroup hierarchy. One of the biggest decisions in the process is deciding whether or not the newsgroups should be on usenet. For what it is worth, that decision was made some time ago; but since no-one from the Foundation has announced it publicly, I won’t either.
I would love to know what the majority of people want the decision to be. From what I’ve read so far there appears to be no clear preference for usenet provider.
Click here to vote.
