As if I haven’t been plugging Firefox and Thunderbird enough, I’ve found yet another reason to love Thunderbird: customizability. For those of you that use Thunderbird, you may have noticed that the address book can generate a map in Firefox (or whatever your default browser happens to be) via Mapquest if you hit the “Get Map” button. Well, I prefer Google Maps, so I did some searching, and it’s actually a pretty easy fix to redirect those requests to Google Maps instead.
First, you’ll need to download and install the “about:config” extension for Thunderbird. If you haven’t installed extensions for Thunderbird before, it’s a little different than in Firefox. You need to actually save the .xpi extension file, and then manually install that extension file via the Tools->Extensions->Install menu item in Thunderbird. The extension gives you the same functionality that the “about:config” command does in Firefox, allowing you to modify almost any setting, although most of them are not intuitive, unfortunately. In this case, you need to change the default value of mail.addr_book.mapit_url.format to
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=@A1,%20@A2,%20@CI,%20@ST,%20@ZI
Once you do that, the “Get Map” button in the Address Book will immediately generate maps in Google Maps. Sweet…
By the way, this particular extension allows you to add a button to your toolbar, although it’s not activated by default. To add it, right-click on the toolbar until you see a “customize” selection appear. Once you click on that, you’ll see a bunch of buttons that you can drag and drop anywhere on the toolbar, including a new button for “about:config.” You can also rearrange your toolbar if you like.
While I’m at this, I guess I might as well plug another useful Thunderbird extension: the Contacts Sidebar. It too has a handy button you can add to your toolbar, allowing you to see all of your address book contacts in the left sidebar underneath your mail folders.
