Good tidings for all web users!

As we approach the holiday season, story has it that wise men approached from the east bearing good tidings. This year LeadDiscovery is doing the bearing (albeit from the west) and even better, these tidings are not going to cost you a penny(!) as today we introduce to you Mozilla's open-source software for faster and safer internet browsing & mail handling. We hope that you forgive us for deviating from our normal course of supplying R&D information but Mozilla's software will make using our information a less fustrating experience in the future.

A break from drug discovery! At LeadDiscovery we are dedicated to doing our bit to optimize drug discovery. Although this usually involves supplying scientific information, the utility of this information is tempered somewhat if the programs you are using makes accessing this information slow and cumbersome. We feel that it is our duty therefore to break for a moment from supplying R&D information and to introduce you to the Mozilla software that we discovered a few weeks ago.

Looking for improved web browsing & mail handling: Throughout the year our team batters the internet identifying journal articles, press releases, and reports judged to be of importance to the drug discovery community. In turn we then batter our e-mail systems distributing our DailyUpdates service, announcing this information to you, the audience.

For the past few years our team has struggled with slow and unstable web browsing through Explorer, and frequent crashes using Outlook. A few weeks ago these problems disappeared when we discovered Mozilla. This US based organization is dedicated to developing the next generation of web browser and e-mail software. The software is open source - ie it is available to anyone free of charge.

Mozilla Firefox - Faster and safer web browsing: At the beginning of December, 2005 we evaluated Firefox as a possible replacement for Microsoft's Explorer and within a few days the advantages seen in Firefox were so great all of our PCs now run off of this browser. Currently about15-30% of PCs use Firefox however this figure is rising. We recommend Firefox for anyone who regularly uses the internet due to the speed and stability with which it loads webpages. These advantages are extended still further by the inbuilt Google toolbar. Links to the Firefox download page are provided here

Mozilla Thunderbird for better mail handling: Following our positive experiences with Firefox we then went on to test Thunderbird. Our main problem with our previous mail program, Outlook, was that it frequently crashed, a problem our IT team said was inherent to pst files which the program uses to store data. In addition important mail was frequently sent to our junk box. Since we downloaded Thunderbird we have experienced almost no crashes and one of the nice aspects of this program is that the junk filter is trainable - you tell the program which mail is junk and it gradually learns to detect future junk itself. Our experience suggests that Thunderbird is a very good learner! A further useful feature of Thunderbird is that it also acts as a great RSS reader, streaming news feed as e-mail-like messages. We will leave describing RSS feeds to another time but if you are already familiar with this technology you may be interested to know that our existing RSS reader is now unused! Thunderbird can be downloaded here

We hope that you have found this entry of use and that you forgive us for deviating from our normal course of supplying R&D information...please be assured that our next offering will be well and truly back in the mold of drug discovery,