Scott Nellé.com

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great free email client, but one thing about it has always bugged me: When you reply to a message, it puts something like “Scott Nellé wrote:” above the quoted text. Every other program I’ve ever used includes the date and time as well, which helps give context to the message. Unfortunately there’s no apparent way to change this from the options panel. But there is a way to do it. Here’s how:

1. Open the options panel. In Windows, go to Tools > Options… (For Mac OSX Thunderbird > Preferences…, for Linux Edit > Preferences…)
2. Click the Advanced tab and then the Config Editor button.
3. Find the preference named “mailnews.reply_header_type” and change its value to 2 (it’s probably set to 1 by default.)

Your replies should now show something like “On 2/28/2008 9:25 AM, Scott Nellé wrote:” above the text you’re responding to. Sweet.

Check Mozilla’s site for more info about reply header options in Thunderbird. Though that section mentions editing user.js, you should be able to make most changes in the config editor as mentioned above.

The debate over Internet Explorer 8’s proposed version targeting continues, and issue #253 of A List Apart features two good articles about it–one on either side of the fence. Jeremy Keith’s article (he’s on the “nay” side) suggests that IE8 should launch as a beta with version targeting disabled to see just how much it breaks the web. This is a brilliant suggestion and I can think of no better way to evaluate the need for a version targeting system. In fact, now that it’s been proposed I think it would be foolhardy of Microsoft to approach it any other way.

As a bonus, and in defense of not crippling IE8 by default, Keith’s article offers this line which is solid gold:

If IE8 is going to differentiate itself from its predecessor by having better standards support, then surely we can assess how it will render websites by simply viewing those websites in a standards-compliant browser like, say, Firefox, Safari or Opera.

Nice one, Jeremy.

Today is the day that Microsoft will be pushing out Internet Explorer 7 as an automatic update. I’ve taken a few precautions to keep IE6 at least for the time being, but with any luck I’ll be able to let it go soon. I’ll be checking stats for some of our client sites at USM with an eager eye toward any sharp drop in IE6 usage starting today.

I must admit that there’s a part of me that will miss IE6. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty extensive knowledge of its bugs, and I’ve developed a great aptitude for fixing issues triggered by those bugs. Once its gone, all that knowledge will be of no use and I’ll have one less valuable skill as a developer. For the good of everyone else, however, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

Update: I’m a little disappointed at the ease with which I dodged the “forced update.” All it took was disabling automatic updates. The more complicated instructions that were floating around only seem to have applied to server versions of Windows. I’m still interested to see how overall IE6 usage changes going forward. A quick and unscientific survey of stats for a handful of sites shows that somewhere between 40% and 50% of Internet Explorer users are still using IE6 or lower. Those numbers come from sites with a fairly general (not specifically high tech) audience.