Mozilla has officially made Sunbird and Lightning 0.3 available for public consumption! For those of you who are using Outlook simply because it has a calendar and Thunderbird doesn’t you might find Lightning to be a great alternative. Not sure which of the two you should be using? Mozilla gives this information to help you choose:
You may prefer Mozilla Sunbird if…
- you prefer your calendar to be separate from your email client
- you don’t currently use Mozilla Thunderbird for your email
- you don’t like adding add-ons (such as extensions or themes) to your applications
You may prefer Lightning if…
- you send or receive meeting invitations via email
- you already use Mozilla Thunderbird for email
- you customize your applications with add-ons (such as extensions or themes)
This is extremely cool. The only thing I would like to see is a Google Calendar extension made to interact with it. That way I can view the calendar offline but I would also have access to a great calendar interface wherever I go.
Both Sunbird and Lightning have a strong future ahead of them and it will be interesting to see what unique features are added to help distinguish itself. Keep up the great work Mozilla!
I like Lightning, but I still use Yahoo as my primary calendar.
I’m actually a little surprised that you still use Yahoo Calendar because isn’t it pretty basic? Everyone I knew who used Yahoo Calendar switched to Google Calendar but there could be something that I don’t know. Out of curiosity why do you use it?
I just prefer the simplicity of the Yahoo calendar and use it on my home page. I never really was impressed with the Google Calendar or any of the other Google items (such as GMail).
Mozilla Sunbird is ok to view your Google calendar in, but its a shame that you cant add events from the interface.
Yeah, that is the thing I miss the most, too. I want to be able to add the events from a desktop application and have the two synchronize. I think Google figured someone would make a great desktop application that uses the Google Calendar API but that doesn’t appear to be happening. Sure there is Calgoo but I don’t want my information going through their servers.
Google should just make a desktop application themselves. In fact, they should make a desktop application that will let you access your Calendar, Notebook, GMail, and I’m sure there is more to add to that list. That would be truly awesome!