keeping an application icon in the dock, and transferring Thunderbird profile from PC

Just got a new Macbook Pro (have been a PC user all my life), and am very impressed so far. I'm puzzled at every turn, but determined to solve all the mysteries in time...

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird to the Mac and (thought I) pinned them both to the dock. But every time I restart the computer question marks appear in place of icons for those two programs in the dock. Is there a way to solidify their presence on the computer? When I tried to create an alias for them both from their icons, the computer said I don't have authorization to do so. Maybe they're not correctly/fully downloaded onto the machine?

Also, I'd like to transfer my folders/subfolders and Address Book of Thunderbird over from my PC to the Mac. Does anyone know how to do this?

Many thanks in advance!

It sounds like you didn't complete the installation of the applications. Mac applications will download either with a package installer or will have instructions to drag the downloaded file to your applications folder. I have Thunderbird installed but I can't remember which installation process it used.

To get an idea of what I'm referring... read the following Mac Application Installation Guide from the Mac Rumors forum: LINK

How to move data from Thunderbird PC to Thunderbird Mac: LINK

Thanks so much for the quick response! I read through that helpful link you sent and now know what the ".dmg" stands for!
I found that my newly downloaded "applications" were still seen as devices by the Mac, until I dragged them, in the Finder, from the Devices tab up to the Applications tab. This has seemed to pin them to the Dock for real at last.
The Thunderbird problem, however, persists. I've read a number of articles on this, dating from 2007 up to 2011 (nothing more recent), including the article at the link you sent, but they all assume the Mac has a Profiles folder under Thunderbird that one can access. I still can't access that folder (even in the Library)--I only bring up the Profiles folder I myself created when I copied all my PC's data onto the Mac. If I can ever find that Mac version of the Profiles folder, I may be able to substitute into it the contents of the PC's T-bird Profiles folder and then T-bird *may* acknowledge the contents....

The Thunderbird profiles folder is located here:

MacIntosh HD/Users/your user name/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/

However, it's hidden from your view in the user library folder. The entire user library folder is hidden. Here's how to make it visible... follow these instructions:

Open your Terminal application. (Applications, Utilities, Terminal.app)

When it opens, copy and paste the following after the prompt and then press return.

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Now type in the word exit

Your user library folder should now be visible and you can use the Finder to navigate to the profiles folder.

Thank you very much!
Do you know if it's safe for me to replace the profiles folder the Mac has set up for my Mac version of T-bird (and how would one do that exactly)?

Yes, it should be safe to replace the profile. We have had other users who switched from Windows to OS X and were T-Bird advocates do the same successfully.

Copying your profile from the PC to your new MacBook Pro should be straight forward. Use a thumb drive (flash drive) to move the profile. Just make sure you move it to the correct place (as indicated above). What will happen is that you'll overwrite the Mac profile with the copied one from Windows.

Unfortunately, when I pasted the "defaults ____" folder from my PC T-bird Profiles folder into the Mac Profiles folder (first alongside its own "defaults ____" folder and then within it), the Mac showed the files inside the folder to be all grey nonentities it wouldn't recognize (not the white files it does recognize). Is there any way to get the Mac to read these migrated files, or have I done this all wrong?

So sorry to cause so much trouble!

Just as a follow-up, I finally ended up having an easy time migrating the T-bird Profile from PC to Mac by following the directions at this link:

Migrating Thunderbird from PC to Mac « michael tauscher