A new book titled Firefox and Thunderbird Garage (Chris Hofmann, Marcia Knous and John Hedtke; Prentice Hall PTR, 2005) is set to hit the shelves this month. Firefox and Thunderbird are the free, open source products available from the Mozilla Foundation (http://www.mozilla.org). Firefox is a Web browser that in recent months has been challenging Microsoft Internet Explorer’s dominance of browsers. Thunderbird is an e-mail reader that offers an option to Outlook Express and other readers.

If “Firefox” makes you think of Clint Eastwood’s Cold War action flick, and “Thunderbird” conjures up Ford’s seminal vehicle, this book is not for you. If you’ve taken the plunge and are using the Firefox Web browser or Thunderbird e-mail reader, this book is worth a look.

So why a book about browsing the Web and reading e-mail? Because Firefox and Thunderbird are about making the Web and e-mail easier, safer and more enjoyable. “ Hopefully, this book will build people’s confidence and convince them that it requires no special technical skill to start using a new browser (Firefox) and e-mail program (Thunderbird),” Marcia Knous, co-author, told me by e-mail. “Hopefully the book will also get readers excited about using Firefox & Thunderbird, for their ease of use, their special features, and enhanced security features, which are all clearly explained and demonstrated within the book's pages.”

The authors know their subjects inside and out. They should. Chris Hofmann is the director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. In fact, he was the Foundation’s first employee back in 2003 after an eight year stint at Netscape, where the Mozilla project started. Marcia Knous is a project manager with the Mozilla Foundation and gets her hands dirty on both Firefox and Thunderbird development. And John Hedtke helps pull it all together with his broad writing and technology experience.

Firefox and Thunderbird Garage is one of the first books for this software. In particular, it is an early entry for non-technical users. The book balances basic how-to tips with clear and detailed technical information. Hofmann and crew dig into every feature, menu and function of the software. John Hedtke commented, “Even though I had already been using Firefox and Thunderbird for several months before I started writing the book, there are a ton of things I learned from working with Chris Hofmann and Marcia Knous; tips and tricks I still don't think I would have figured out.”

I’ve been using Firefox for most of the last year, and I learned a few things, as well. Like me, the authors love the tabbed browsing feature. This lets you open multiple Web sites in a single window and switch between them. It’s great when you want to compare several items on different Web sites; there’s no more “Back-Back-Back” to get to the page you started on. The book offers some solid examples of using tabbed browsing.

Firefox and Thunderbird Garage is written in a narrative form, not in numbered steps or tasks. This makes it a little difficult to flip to a page and get the help you need. The rich content that the authors offer, however, more than makes up for this. An extensive index will surely help, though my preview copy didn’t have one.

Among the appendices, there’s an excellent section with keyboard and mouse shortcuts. This guide offers Firefox and Thunderbird shortcuts alongside their matching commands in other browsers and e-mail readers. It’s a handy way to help transition from Internet Explorer to Firefox, or from Outlook Express to Thunderbird.

My favorite tip was to click the scroll wheel over a link to open the page in a new tab. Go on, try it.