In my review of Mozilla 1.7 last week on Blogcritics, an interesting discussion broke out about software called Firefox and Thunderbird. It's a topic worthy of standing out on its own.

If you've been reading the reviews here, you will know that Mozilla is the open-source browser that is a cousin to the Netscape browser (without all that AOL baggage.) It is actually a suite of applications, for it includes the browser, the mail and news reader, an instant messaging app called Chatzilla, and a rudimentary HTML editor.

At the same time that the Mozilla Foundation has been improving Mozilla, they have been working on other projects. Two of them, Firefox and Thunderbird, come about by the process of unbundling the Mozilla suite of Internet applications. The current version of Firefox is 0.9.1, which means it is software that has not had its first "official" release yet, it is still considered "beta" software, or a work-in-progress. The current version of Thunderbird is 0.71.

Firefox is the standalone web browser. Since it is not dragging around other applications with it, it is smaller and faster than its big brother, Mozilla. To compare, the download package for Mozilla 1.7 checks in at 12 MB, while Firefox is only 4.8 MB. Like most people who have used it, I think it renders (or opens) web pages faster than Mozilla. It has all the features that make Mozilla a better browser than IE (pop-up blockers, tabbed browsing, standards compliance, avoidance of ActiveX) and it has a long list of extension,s or extras, that you can install to get even more functionality. It will easily import your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and other settings from Mozilla, IE, or Netscape.

Thunderbird is the standalone mail and news program. It's download package is 6 MB, and is similarly faster than the Mail portion of Mozilla. It has all the features you would normally want in a mail reader, including some excellent antispam controls. Since Thunderbird and Firefox are two different packages, you can make Firefox your default browser while still using Microsoft Outlook (not that you should want to do that) as your default mail reader. Or set up any other combination you choose.