Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Still here, still changing, still relevant, still your best choice
If you're stuck without access to tech support – say, half way to the Moon – then you're better off with a single install of Thunderbird than any number of Outlooks.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'
Your borderline geriatric correspondent just barely remembers Apollo 11's first moon landing, and would have been more excited about the recent Artemis mission if it hadn't been accompanied by massive NASA cuts .

As it was, for us, the single most memorable line from NASA's recent Moon-orbital mission was the sublime "I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working ."
That is why you should have a FOSS browser and a FOSS messaging client that keeps your stuff locally.

Since even the default Windows browser is now just a skin around Google Chrome, Mozilla is your best option.

Firefox 150 makes split view more useful - click to enlarge
Aside from the pleasingly round version numbers, neither of these are massive releases.

The built-in PDF viewer and editor was already very handy, but it just got a handy new ability.

Now, it can manipulate pages in PDFs: you can remove or re-order pages, copy and paste them, and export individual pages or sets of pages from multipage PDFs.

The PDF viewer is getting so capable that there's little reason for a standalone viewer any more.

That's no bad thing: for instance, at the time of writing, the macOS version of the latest Adobe Reader is a hefty 762 MB download.

Security permissions have been further tightened, and now Firefox applies network access restrictions to devices on your local network as well.

With this release, Linux users get a native Gtk emoji picker, and emojis should display correctly on Macs even in Apple's "lockdown mode ." As we covered back in January , Mozilla now offers official RPM packages of Firefox, and although they were not yet available at the time of writing, these should soon include this version.

Calling International Interplanetary Rescue
Thunderbird 150 is a go, as well.

Good to know if you're on your way to the Moon – or to Mars .

This release inherits Firefox's improved PDF handling, and also supports the new Unobtrusive Email Signatures standard to make encrypted mails more readable on clients that don't support encryption.

Thunderbird can now search even encrypted message bodies.

On the first run of a new install, the new Account Hub simplified account-configuration tool opens automatically, and the tool now includes more options for configuring account authentication.

Address book entries can be copied to the clipboard in vCard format, you can override the OS and choose your own accent color, and more.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: even if you are perfectly happy using webmail, you should install and configure Thunderbird, so you have a full local backup of all your mail, contacts, and your calendar, just in case you lose access to your account.

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If the hectic release schedule is a bit too much for you, then there are long-lived Extended Support Releases of both products.

Currently, the ESR version of both is version 140: specifically, Firefox 140.10 , and Thunderbird 140.9.1 .