Switching to Sunbird from KOrganizer: A comparative review
It wasn’t all that long ago that Mozilla released the first public offering of Sunbird, a calendering companion to the popular Firefox web browser that I already use and prefer.
I paid no mind to the announcement at the time, as I was happy enough with KOrganizer for this purpose. Recently one bug drove me over the edge to seek alternatives. I was being asked to repeatedly click on an error message which wasn’t helpful enough to allow me to solve the problem, which I couldn’t confirm was a problem anyway. Very frustrating.
In just a few days of use, Sunbird seems so much better– it’s hard to imagine going back anytime soon.
For those evaluating the alternatives, I offer this personal comparative review of the two applications, explaining which features are important to me, and how these two stack up.
Beyond the basic calendar features, I have two needs that might be considered challenging: I need to be able to see multiple calender events at once through one view, and I need support for some my calender data to be hosted remotely and refreshed automatically.
I also have a short “want list” of features that are nice to have but I can live without:
- the ability view and edit my work calendar from home
- reminders that popup on my desktop to notify me
- the ability to keep private events private when publishing
3 Responses to “Switching to Sunbird from KOrganizer: A comparative review”
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June 16th, 2005 at 10:55 am
I can’t figure out how to set each calendar to a different color in Sunbird. How does one do it?
October 19th, 2005 at 10:19 pm
i am a happy user of korganizer.
sunbird’s problems:
1. poor UI response. cpu/memory hog.
2. no journal support yet, and never see its clue for future support
3. inflexible UI customization, especially for standalone sunbird, you cannot even turn off the horribly large toolbar!
i prefer *smooth and responsive* apps with a *complete* set of major functionality(refer to journal) rather than a stumble app with minor features but lact of major ones. and i believe minor ones are much more likely to be implemented soon than major ones
November 24th, 2005 at 6:48 am
Well, certainly there’s a advantage in usability in favor of KOrganizer when it comes to mouse usage - drag & drop events, change start & end time by dragging etc. I’ve seen less experienced/patient users curse at Sunbird because of its below par performance in this respect. Hopefully it will improve.
With KOrganizer 3.2.1 I’ve experienced quite some crashes, and once even *complete loss* of a remote calendar file, it happened when clicking the display/don’t display check box for the calendar a couple of times to force reload!
An irritating KDE behaviour is that whenever KOrganizer reloads the calendar file from a remote location, a download window gets show above what you’re currently doing, grabbing keyboard focus! Just for 1-3 seconds, but still *very* annoying! IF this gets shown to the user, then only in the KOrganizer window (e.g. on status bar)!
So none of the two are really satisfying, but I prefer KOrganizer.