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That's what the UAbar is for. It works great for me on MBNA America's site. Funny thing, it worked perfectly before they "upgraded" their payment section to their new system, but now it says that I'm running an old version of Netscape. With the UAbar set to IE6 on XP -- the epitome of web browsing in the eyes of Checkfree and MBNA, apparently -- it works without a hitch.

Install User Agent Toolbar Widget or User Agent Switcher.

And for any banks that don't work with other browsers, the solution is to email them a nastygram, then either switch banks (if you're idealistic to a fault) or use IE for that site (if you're practical). There's no reason to use an inferior browser when you don't have to. (There's a plugin that makes it easy to switch to IE on the fly.)

Regular Mozilla, while a bid slower than Firebird, has an IE theme.

yes, asx playlist parsing is not perfect yet, there is a patch, but it hasnt been committed yet.

in the mean time you can use http://mozplayerxp.mozdev.org or mplayerplug-in.sf.net if you use mozilla.

or just wget the .asx and vi it, then mplayer mms:// blah.

on some .asx , it will be fine to use mplayer -playlist http://blah.com/s.asx

An installer like this? http://seb.mozdev.org/firebird?

Opera is a fine browser, no question, but a lot of these features have also found their way into other browsers. On *nix, Konqueror has address bar searching (gg: will do a Google search, for instance), and, of course, Firebird has its own search bar. And Firebird, similarly, supports aliases/keywords just as well as Opera.

The reason I tend to prefer Firebird is because of the extensions support. I've grown so fond of things like being able to search for text within a select box, or the very capable Adblock, that it has become quite annoying to switch to browsers without similar support.

Sadly, both browsers have some problems under *nix: Opera tends to be a tad unstable, and Firebird doesn't integrate well with Thunderbird, my mailto handler of choice (though it's improving). Nonetheless, both are very solid pieces of work, and both having many things to recommend them over MSIE....

How can you Linux guys live without the Toolbar ? I *need* to know. Are you actually going to google.com every time you want to find a pic?

When I was using Galeon, I would just put a "Search Google" box in my toolbar. (Here's a screenshot with three Google search boxes. Two of them are folded closed to save space). Firebird has similar functionality.

For a variety of reasons I switched back to plain old Mozilla, and certainly don't visit Google.com directly. Personally I use a bookmark keywords . I've got "g" mapped to Google, so I just type something like "g galeon screenshots" in my address bar and I get a search for "galeon screenshots" from Google. It's such a handy feature that I've got similar keywords for Wikipedia, Everything2, dictionary.com, FreshMeat, and a few others.

However, if I was only using one search engine, I might use the default behavior build into the address bar. When you type an address in a drop list of suggests appears below. The bottom one is always, "Search ENGINE for 'YOUR KEYWORDS'", where ENGINE is one of the many options you can configure (including Google), and YOUR KEYWORDS are whatever you typed. You just select it and off you go.

If you're really keen on having a search box dedicated to Google, well, besides trying something like Galeon or Firebird, you can install the Googlebar (screenshots). Personally I'm no longer keen on adding search boxes to toolbars, I want less user interface on screen, not more. Less interface means more space for actual web page.

How are you checking PageRankings?

As a general rule I try to not obsess about what piece of software thinks about my web site or the web sites of others. Knowing PageRanking is certainly amusing, and it may be marginally useful if you're doing professional web work, but is it really that critical?

I'll admit, it's a shame Mozilla doesn't provide it, but it's not really that big of a deal.

As a bonus, it's the best popup blocker ever. I haven't seen one in a year and a half.

Neither have I. It seems a bit odd to co-mingle popup-blocking and searching into a single component, but I guess if it works for you. Mozilla's popup blocking support works great and comes built in to the browser. As a bonus I can also stop sites from doing other irritating things. For example, I've forbidden sites from resizing or moving existing windows or moving windows up and down in the screen ordering. If you're sick of sites doing stupid crawls in your status bar or hiding the real destination for links you can just click "Allow scripts to...Change status bar text."

I do like the tabbed browsing but it's like I have tabbed browsing now; I just have a dozen browsers open. I switch between them along the taskbar. RAM is cheap today gentleman. I don't really care how many of my machine's resources it takes.

Tabbed browsing has never been about resources; that you think it does shows a serious lack of understanding about modern web browsers. Every major browser (including IE and Mozilla) will only run one copy of the program, regardless of how many windows you have open. Tabs are not significantly more efficient than windows.

Tabbed browsing is about organization. The task bar works fine, but it doesn't scale. If you've got 20 windows open you've just got twenty little teeny icons with almost no text. XP's grouping helps, but all of the web browser windows get lumped together. A typical use case would be to have a window open to a web email site, another window reading a list of bugs assigned to me and a bunch of tabs for individual bugs I'm loo

How can you Linux guys live without the Toolbar ? I *need* to know. Are you actually going to google.com every time you want to find a pic?

When I was using Galeon, I would just put a "Search Google" box in my toolbar. (Here's a screenshot with three Google search boxes. Two of them are folded closed to save space). Firebird has similar functionality.

For a variety of reasons I switched back to plain old Mozilla, and certainly don't visit Google.com directly. Personally I use a bookmark keywords . I've got "g" mapped to Google, so I just type something like "g galeon screenshots" in my address bar and I get a search for "galeon screenshots" from Google. It's such a handy feature that I've got similar keywords for Wikipedia, Everything2, dictionary.com, FreshMeat, and a few others.

However, if I was only using one search engine, I might use the default behavior build into the address bar. When you type an address in a drop list of suggests appears below. The bottom one is always, "Search ENGINE for 'YOUR KEYWORDS'", where ENGINE is one of the many options you can configure (including Google), and YOUR KEYWORDS are whatever you typed. You just select it and off you go.

If you're really keen on having a search box dedicated to Google, well, besides trying something like Galeon or Firebird, you can install the Googlebar (screenshots). Personally I'm no longer keen on adding search boxes to toolbars, I want less user interface on screen, not more. Less interface means more space for actual web page.

How are you checking PageRankings?

As a general rule I try to not obsess about what piece of software thinks about my web site or the web sites of others. Knowing PageRanking is certainly amusing, and it may be marginally useful if you're doing professional web work, but is it really that critical?

I'll admit, it's a shame Mozilla doesn't provide it, but it's not really that big of a deal.

As a bonus, it's the best popup blocker ever. I haven't seen one in a year and a half.

Neither have I. It seems a bit odd to co-mingle popup-blocking and searching into a single component, but I guess if it works for you. Mozilla's popup blocking support works great and comes built in to the browser. As a bonus I can also stop sites from doing other irritating things. For example, I've forbidden sites from resizing or moving existing windows or moving windows up and down in the screen ordering. If you're sick of sites doing stupid crawls in your status bar or hiding the real destination for links you can just click "Allow scripts to...Change status bar text."

I do like the tabbed browsing but it's like I have tabbed browsing now; I just have a dozen browsers open. I switch between them along the taskbar. RAM is cheap today gentleman. I don't really care how many of my machine's resources it takes.

Tabbed browsing has never been about resources; that you think it does shows a serious lack of understanding about modern web browsers. Every major browser (including IE and Mozilla) will only run one copy of the program, regardless of how many windows you have open. Tabs are not significantly more efficient than windows.

Tabbed browsing is about organization. The task bar works fine, but it doesn't scale. If you've got 20 windows open you've just got twenty little teeny icons with almost no text. XP's grouping helps, but all of the web browser windows get lumped together. A typical use case would be to have a window open to a web email site, another window reading a list of bugs assigned to me and a bunch of tabs for individual bugs I'm loo

My favorite solution is to install Mozilla on nearby PCs, cover it with IE Skin, and replace their desktop/launchbar shortcuts for IE with Folgers crystals.

I don't think such functionality is available for Firebird, although I can't rule out the possibility. The number of extensions is vast. Check out Mozdev.

I would like to add that you are a rather special case, and that it can't be easy to maintain Yahoo! companion on all the systems you work with. Don't you think that a web-based bookmark collection might serve You better?

...If Google were to support the Toolbar in Moz and I'd probably switch...

Ah! But there is a google toolbar for Moz. Happy switching.

Unless of course you use mozex.

Maybe you missed that little button on Firebird titled "Plug-in FAQ"? I was having a couple of issues with one or two plug-ins and after reading this and following a couple of steps - no problems! Here is the link to the plug-in FAQ. Plus they list all all the OSX known problems so they ARE working on solving them. If there is something missing from their list, bugtraq it to them.

And for your google search, skip that 'g' and just type away in the addressbar, if it is not a known protocol it searches. Or if you prefer to have domain guessing you can always assign that g to google, og an 'a' for altavista or allthewen, whatever you desire. You can assign keywords to any site, just like mentioned in parent about Opera.

Only thing I miss is the possibillity to choose content-transfer-encoding per account or per message.

http://preferential.mozdev.org/

I totally agee. But since it possible to install more search plugins in the search box of Firebird, I would like to see both methods implemented.

And by the way, I wan't those search plugins installed in my profile directory!

to add mailto: support to Firebird just install mozex extension

Which ever Mozilla you select browse around on the plug-in sections afterwards to really get it going. Mouse gestures / radial menues (an improvement on gestures IHMO) are available as plugins as an example.

A fun one I found is Moji which is an integrated Kanji dictionary. Select a Kanji on a Japanese page and you can have it instantly translated. (It's not very advanced right now though, but a good idea of what can be done.)

If only you used Firebird with the downloadable Preferences bar to surf with images disabled. It helps when you incidentally stumble into some questionable material at work or anywhere else. You can RealDoll all day and just see blocks in place of images. That is, until your sysadmin starts checking access logs.

Maybe it is, Moz can run tetris, after all.

Mozdev has some tips about completely disabling IE, even in other applications.

This exists via an extension for Firebird: See here.

If there's any third party IP in there then relicencing becomes a complete nightmare. The codecs suffer from this fate.

You might recall a similar problem being faced with Mozilla. Stuff like the spell checker couldn't be opened and had to be left out of Mozilla and made available as a proprietary plugin by Netscape. With any luck over time the Open parts of the product will grow so as to render the closed parts into legacy. But that will take time. There is no magic wand that can change the past.

Try adblock
Allows you to remove anything by regexps.
Don't like Unicast? just add http://*unicast.net* and set adblock to 'remove' all content coming from there from the page.

Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements and still be able to watch Strong Bad answering his e-mail.

AdBlock

It blocks pretty much everything, and not only from specific servers but regexp too.

No, it's an extension.

Nothing in development mozillas, you can grab it here.

Just don't use crappy IE and you won't be exploited by this crap.

Some good catch-alls for Adblock

*servedby*
*/ad/*
*/ads/*
*doubleclick.net*

http://adblock.mozdev.org

Lets you selectively block Flash objects, as well as filter out a whole bunch of other crap. Like Slashdot ad banners :)

Adblock for Mozilla and Firebird is a very robust and precise content-filterer that allows users to specify filters which remove unwanted content based on the source-address (ex.: *doubleclick*, */ad*, *.swf, http://www.goatse.cx/*) and much, much more. It blocks anything that can be seen in a browser.

Yes I think Me and my IE6.0 on a Commadore 64 will work nicely. Oooh look, now I'm running IE5.0 on a Mac! (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)

The mozilla "click-to-play flash" add-on that you can find here

Yay open source, yadda yadda yadda.

Discussion and fixes on the project homepage, since last I checked the author wasn't responding to bugs, etc. He may have moved on (and that's just fine).

ever heard of wildcards?
To block all images from http://somesite.com just add http://somesite.com/* to the block list.
Same applies to flash movies.
Even more, Adblock supports regular expressions!
to quote their page:

Adblock supports two types of filters: simple, and Regular Expression.
A simple-filter is just a string of text with one or more wildcards (*). Regular expressions are much more complex, allowing precise control over filtering. In Adblock, as in all javascript, regular expressions must begin and end with the forward-slash: '/'. This page doesn't have enough space to include a RegExp tutorial, so for more info, head here.

I advocate Mozilla to everyone I know, and pop-up blocking is often the bread-winning feature. Generally people are already so sick of IE (and those that aren't are often persuaded by descriptions IE's many, many security problems) that it doesn't take much coaxing. Many realize the convenience of tabbed browsing and switch if only for that reason (not to mention the featureful extensions for tab power-users).

-Nick

Better yet, you can use adblock extension for Mozilla SeaMonkey/FireBird. The latest development branch already can block page elements BEFORE they load. alk about speeding up surfing, when you don't have to wait on doubleclik, googlesyndication, clickserve, hitbox, trafficmp, etc...

It also can block flash, iframe and java, javascript as well...

see mozdev for install.

DISCLAIMER: MS IE (l)users need not apply!

It also allows wildcarding, so instead of having to block every single fastclick server, you can just have "*fastclick*" in your preferences and you get 0 ads from fastclick (the one who serves the "1000 free smiley" ads).

I'd recommend the AdBlock project to kill both imge and flash ads, http://adblock.mozdev.org/.

It's perfect for letting some sites show you ads, like umm..slashdot, and blocking others.

Smarter in blocking content by letting you use wildcards. I've been using it on Firebird, it ads a tab on top of ads to block with a single click. You can also click on the statusbar to see what is blockable/blocked on a page.

easy:
there is a plugin for Mozilla (regular and firebird) to transform flash objects into a button. If you press the button, the flash object is loaded. I've used it extensively on windows (I have some pb installing it on Linux).

Combine it with the best image blocker plugin and the tab plugin and you've got the best environment ever.

Artaxerxes

easy:
there is a plugin for Mozilla (regular and firebird) to transform flash objects into a button. If you press the button, the flash object is loaded. I've used it extensively on windows (I have some pb installing it on Linux).

Combine it with the best image blocker plugin and the tab plugin and you've got the best environment ever.

Artaxerxes

Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements and still be able to watch Strong Bad answering his e-mail.

Get the Flash click-to-view extension. Only the flash you click on will be viewed. The single bast extension to Mozilla, IMO.

used to have the prefbar installed some time ago. I just went back and tried to install it as a normal user and it failed. (required file not found) There is a link on the page you referred to for Linux/*nix installation instructions that is 404. Additionally, there is a link for a mailing list on the page that does not exist. It looks like development on this tool is dead. Does anyone know any different?

You have to install as root. I just installed it and it looks great. Somebody mod grandparent up.

I run the suite because AdBlock works in both the browser and mail clients. Meaning: I can block banner ads from my incoming email. Yes, this really is an issue - especially after signing up for comics.com's free subscription service. I absolutely hate their banner ad logo asking me to sign up for their "premium" service.

Also, Prefbar only seems to work with Mozilla. :(

Actually there's something close for Firebird now: PrefButtons.

Also, Prefbar only seems to work with Mozilla. :(

Actually there's something close for Firebird now: PrefButtons.

Exactly. And an even better solution is to use PrefBar. It is small, not intrusive (Press F8 to show or hide it) and very convenient.

You can change the user-agent, remove flash animations, turn on/off images etc. Give it a try...

Note: Firebird is meant to be a stripped down browser, but extensible for those who want additional functionality. Thus, I will refer you to many extensions you need to install.

1.) When a link has a target=_blank it opens a new browser instead of a new tab. Cannot express how much this annoys me.

Get Tabbrowswer Extensions

2.) You cannot save a series of tabs to always open everytime you restart the browser.

Again, Tabbrowser Extensions

3.) Can't disable gif animation.

Several ways to do this, but my favorite is the Things they left out extension. Adds in some missing 'zilla pref pages.

4.) Cannot turn on the tab bar by default or always have it on

Can't help you here, don't know what you mean.

5.) Doesn't have zoom feature or a "always use my stylesheet" feature like opera (this is incredibly handy when dealing with sites that insist on impossible-to-read-text)

You can hack your stylesheets, but I'm sure there's an extension or bookmarklet that allows you to override your stylesheet.

6.) cannot change it's indentity like you can in Opera to, say, IE 6.xx -- this is becoming less and less of a deal as fewer websites I go to at least "require" IE 6.x.

Check out User Agent Switcher, or a number of other extensions that change your UA.

HTH

Note: Firebird is meant to be a stripped down browser, but extensible for those who want additional functionality. Thus, I will refer you to many extensions you need to install.

1.) When a link has a target=_blank it opens a new browser instead of a new tab. Cannot express how much this annoys me.

Get Tabbrowswer Extensions

2.) You cannot save a series of tabs to always open everytime you restart the browser.

Again, Tabbrowser Extensions

3.) Can't disable gif animation.

Several ways to do this, but my favorite is the Things they left out extension. Adds in some missing 'zilla pref pages.

4.) Cannot turn on the tab bar by default or always have it on

Can't help you here, don't know what you mean.

5.) Doesn't have zoom feature or a "always use my stylesheet" feature like opera (this is incredibly handy when dealing with sites that insist on impossible-to-read-text)

You can hack your stylesheets, but I'm sure there's an extension or bookmarklet that allows you to override your stylesheet.

6.) cannot change it's indentity like you can in Opera to, say, IE 6.xx -- this is becoming less and less of a deal as fewer websites I go to at least "require" IE 6.x.

Check out User Agent Switcher, or a number of other extensions that change your UA.

HTH

"Kill Flash" is the most sexy, beautiful button ever made. Thank you, PrefBar guys. You rock.

For those who don't know: this little button removes the last annoying traces of advertising from the web, and IMHO is a necessary addition to the wonderful standard Mozilla capabilities "Block unrequested pop-ups" and "Block Images from this server"

googlebar.mozdev.org