UPDATE: I have released the Version 1.1 which now works with all the current Thunderbird versions (thanks to all the guys who mailed me about it).

Currently, Thunderbolt supports only one mail account. Support for multiple mail accounts is in the pipeline.

Download version 1.1

This represents a verse from the so-called ‘Book of Mozilla’, not a real book. What you will see on your Firefox is the third verse. All the three verses can be seen at http://www.mozilla.org/book/

These verses represent important events in the time line of Mozilla. If you view the html source of the page [http://www.mozilla.org/book/] you will notice the significance of each verse with respect to the events they represent.

Verse I

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.

from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

And its significance:

10th December 1994: Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released.
This verse announces the birth of the beast (Netscape) and warns bad coders (up to Netscape 3, when you watched the HTML source code with the internal viewer, bad tags blinked).

Verse II

And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.

from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)

significance:

31st March 1998: the Netscape Navigator source code was released.
The source code is made available to the legion of thousands of coders of the open source community, that will fight against the followers of Mammon (Microsoft Internet Explorer).

Verse III

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

significance:

15th July 2003: AOL closed its Netscape division and the Mozilla foundation was created.
The beast died (AOL closed its Netscape division) but immediately rose from its ashes (the creation of the Mozilla foundation and the Firebird browser, although the name was later changed to Firefox).

If you would like these cool verses to adorn your desktop download the wallpapers I created out of them.

Go ahead and download it: here

[UPDATE] This extension works if you have only one account in thunderbird. I’m yet to working on supporting multiple accounts.

One of the ways to access the DOM is as follows:

// Get the content of the currently displaying window
var win = window.content;

// Access the document within the window as follows
win.document.getElementById(‘xyz’);

As easy as that.

The Unavoidable Basics

The plugin source file is a normal text file with the extension .src. Every plugin starts with the tag,

< search

which has the following attributes,

version=”7.1″

the version indicates the latest version of Netscape against which the plugin was tested successfully. This means that the plugin won’t work for lower versions of Netscape. In Firefox specifying a version=”0.0″ indicates compatibility with all versions.

name=”plugin name”

this signifies the name of your plugin. This is the name visible in the search bar list.

description=”plugin description”

here goes the plugin description.

action=”url prefix”

Now pay attention! We need to examine the search url of the site we are building the plugin of. For example, Google has the search url which looks like “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=semantic+void&btnG=Google+Search….” . The action represents the part of the url before ‘?’. So in our case it would be “http://www.google.com/search”.

searchForm=”form url”

An optional element referring to the form in the search page which submits the search.

queryCharset=”utf-8″

This specifies the charset to which the query belongs. If not specified the default charset of the browser is taken.

method=”GET”

Currently only the GET method is supported. Finally complete the search start tag.

>

Now we must define the search parameters to be passed to the search url.

< input name="query" user>

This represents the term that will be typed in by the end-user. Other parameters can also be passed by specifying another input tag, but they should have fixed values.

< input name="category" value="blog">

Then follows the input tag which is used to let the webmasters know where the search originated from.

< input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search">

Having configured the plugin we can now close the search tag.

< / search>

We are all done with creating a search plugin. The plugin source should look somewhat like the following:

< search
version='7.1'
name="plugin name"
description="plugin description"
action="url prefix"
searchForm="form url"
method="GET"
>

< input name="query" user>
< input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search">

< /search>

You can use the plugin generator I created where you need to just fill in a few values and it spurts out the above code for you.

Incase you are hosting your plugin source somewhere and want the browser to automatically check for updates, you can do this using the browser tag. The browser tag follows after the search tag.

< browser
updateIcon="url of plugin icon"
updateCheckDays="10"
>

The update attribute specifies the url of the plugin source file. The updateIcon specifies the url of the plugin icon if any. The updateCheckDays specifies the interval in days after which the browser should check for the update.

For manually installing the plugin you need to copy the src file into the searchplugins folder in the Firefox directory. The next part will introduce you the gory details.

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!”

[via]

And by the way opening many server requests and hoggin up the bandwidth is called Server Raping (-;.

I have written an extension myself which is not dependent on any libraries. Its called Thunderbolt and you can get hold of it here. Here is the screenshot:

[/UPDATE]

One thing I’ve missed in Linux was the new mail notification of Thunderbird that used to pop up every now and then in Windows. I had to manually check for new mail every now and then which was quite frustrating )-:.

But thats history as this wonderful extension comes to the rescue. Get hold of it here.