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firebird is a web browser

This is a copy of a message I sent to a mailing list some time back. They are the guidelines I use when updating my Windows system.

______________________

Some tricks -- mostly born out of antipathy and paranoia -- on dealing with Windoze Update:

• Never accept the default update selections as, in true Micros~1 tradition, they're always wrong. Deselect everything and then select only those pieces you want/need.
• Never download HW device drivers from Microsoft. Always get them from the HW vendor. The vendor knows more about supporting their own hardware than MS possibly could, so it makes little sense to get them from MS. MS might also take it upon themselves to slip in copy protection measures, which you don't want.
• Don't update DirectX through Windows Update; it does not and never has worked. Instead, download separately the very large DirectX update package from Microsoft and install it by hand.
• Don't install the next major version of Internet Explorer, as it's sure to disrupt your system. EXCEPTION: If you're using IE5, you should patch to IE v5.5. IE5 had boatloads of bugs (quelle surprise) which have mostly been addressed in 5.5.
• Don't install the next major version of Windows Media Player. This is where Microsoft's copy protection and usage monitoring measures will first appear in earnest, which you don't want to support. Also, it's not a very good player; there are better free ones available.
• Do download security updates, but be wary of such updates for Windows Media, as Microsoft are trying to change the definition of the word, "security."

Other things you might want to do:

• Unless you are using the calendar/scheduling system, there is absolutely no reason for you to be using Outlook/Outlook Express, and every reason not to. Delete it. With extreme prejudice.
• Download and install Mozilla. It rocks.
• Download the DivX ;-) video codec. You can also install their player, but you don't need to; the codec is usable by any application.
• Download and run RegClean.exe. It's a bit tough to find, but it's a good tool for cleaning the fluff out of the registry from time to time.
• Download and install VirtuaWin, a virtual desktop manager for Windows. This increases the utility of the Windows desktop ten-fold. I hate to tell people about it since it makes Windows tremendously more useful. (It's so nifty, I expect Microsoft to "invent" it in the next major Windows release.)

Although I mostly live in Win2K (when I'm not in Linux or BeOS), I have a Win98 partition that's still working fine without a single re-install. Basically, if you take a minimalist approach, and presume Microsoft to be an untrustworthy/unreliable source, you can greatly extend the life of your Windows installation.

Schwab

Mozilla MailNews/Thunderbird is nice and all but doesn't include some basic features that OE users might have been used to:

bug 75866 - Viewing message for very short time shouldn't mark it as read

bug 30057 - Use one Local Mail tree for all POP3 accounts

bug 43278 - Crossposts (same Message-ID) not marked as read in other groups

Mozilla MailNews/Thunderbird is nice and all but doesn't include some basic features that OE users might have been used to:

bug 75866 - Viewing message for very short time shouldn't mark it as read

bug 30057 - Use one Local Mail tree for all POP3 accounts

bug 43278 - Crossposts (same Message-ID) not marked as read in other groups

Mozilla MailNews/Thunderbird is nice and all but doesn't include some basic features that OE users might have been used to:

bug 75866 - Viewing message for very short time shouldn't mark it as read

bug 30057 - Use one Local Mail tree for all POP3 accounts

bug 43278 - Crossposts (same Message-ID) not marked as read in other groups

Why use thunderbird?

Try the e-mail client within Mozilla. There are lots of cool features, including a spam filter that you teach. I use it at home and see very little spam. I'd use it at work, but we use Outlook there, and I have to reply to Outlook meeting notices and schedule conference rooms.

Brief non-topical note: You might come to like Mozilla the browser, too. It's PC World Magazine's best browser of 2003 (scroll down a bit to see the note).

They think webmail is going to be more popular than imap, or pop3 mail boxes.

If Microsoft lets its market share for desktop-based e-mail clients slip, it could be short-sighted.

I use web-based mail at work (iPlanet/SIMS) and web-based mail (Yahoo) at home as my primary mail-reader. I have broadband in both locations and the responsiveness of web-based e-mail conpared to desktop e-mail clients is negligible.

My work-at-home CEO has satellite at home. He can't use the web-based product because the interactive sluggishness from delay and packet loss would kill his productivity. SSH-tunneled POP works great for him because his local e-mail client (Outlook) downloads new e-mail in the background and sends messages out in the background while he is composing/reading mail quickly in the foreground.

When I administered e-mail for a dialup ISP, the primary method our users preferred to access their e-mail was POP to Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. It is painfully slow to browse through e-mail over a dialup connection. There are still millions of dialup users out there. They are the majority of users on the Internet.

If people use wireless devices in the future, their experience will be more similar to dialup/satellite than broadband, and they'll demand a product that isn't web-based-only. Some of the ideas brought to light by Central or similar technologies could satisfy both broadband/fixed and narrowband/mobile users.

Microsoft makes an excellent user interface for e-mail. They're good at that. Their enterprise/corporate customers may continue to pay for it. Other products like M2, Evolution, and Mozilla will help fill the consumer niche if they open it up. If it weren't for Microsoft's early monopoly bundling tactics vs Netscape Navigator (founded on a "beta/intro is free, production version costs money" business model), we might not have nor expect free browser and e-mail software. We're spoiled. If it weren't for security or playform supportissues, more of us Slashdotters might use Outlook Express.

-ez

PS: I lied. My primary mail reader is MH.

Oh I dunno ... Thunderbird?

I'll admit having used outlook express - it is fast and there already (/me hides) .. This news comes just in time after having switched to Thunderbird, a great, nice, simple, secure e-mail client with lots of potential. For what i need, it's perfect.

Well, guess who isn't stopping their development?

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Version 0.1 is still better than Outlook Express ever was. Anyone with any experience with the Mozilla products, especially Firebird, knows that each incremental version increase brings loads more functionality, features and options.

So while I would shed a tear over Outlook Express going away, truth is, a rat's ass I do not give.

Unless it is part of the EU's ruling, and they are removing the e-mail client completely from new versions of Windows. It would be intereseting to see how many people who have a copy of Windows, also have a copy of Office, and actually use Outlook as their default mail manager.

And is anyone yet to be convinced with Thunderbird yet?

• Cross-platform
• Based on open standards (XML)
• Extremely easy to customise and play around with
• One major project as a proof of concept: Mozilla (Firebird and Thunderbird)

Isn't this just one more reason to use MozillaFirebird?

As a poor substitute to being able to play with it (try bookmarking whittlebit.com and coming back in a day or two) I will try to answer people's questions. For the moment - here is the blurb from the front page:

What is WhittleBit?

Have you ever searched for something and wished you could tell the search engine that it was totally on the wrong track and it should try again? Well now you can! WhittleBit works much like most other search engines, except it can help you to refine your searches by allowing you to give positive or negative feedback on each search result.

Simply rate the search results by clicking on the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" buttons then click on Whittle to get a refined set of search results based on your feedback.

Tips

• Even if you visit another site and then return, WhittleBit will remember your search query until you explicitly click the "New Search" button.
• You can either rate a search result on the results page itself, or visit the page and rate it using the buttons at the top of the page. You will return to the WhittleBit search results after clicking one of the buttons.
• WhittleBit requires a browser which supports "Cookies" and "Frames" such as Mozilla or Internet Explorer.

I love Thunderbird. I started about 2 weeks ago and it filters 90% of the spam. Not perfect, but when you get a 100 a day, it helps. 2 false positives, but I chalk that up to the learning. I run it on WinXP Pro and RH9.0 at home. Surf the net with Firebird at home and work.

"Windows installers can quite happily break your system too."

Yes, but at least I can install an application quickly. All I have to do is download a file, double click it, follow a couple of instructions, and delete the installer. With Linux, you have to find the apropriate package. Then you have to either use the installer tool, and hope it isn't broken (I've never had good luck with RPM), or uncompress the tarball. If you've uncompressed the tarball, you'll have to manually put the files into place. You'll also have to manually check dependencies.

Do you want to remove Mozilla later on Linux? Better to wipe / and reinstall your distro. Windows at least has a control panel applet for removing applications quickly and easily.

What Linux needs is a standard across all distributions for self-extracting tarballs that will do dependency checking (and include the versions of shared libraries they depend on, just in case), and which will add an uninstall script to a central removal database.

Actually ... checks CVS... (yes, I work for Omni)

OmniWeb's shortcuts have been around since at least Apr, 1998 (compared to May, 2001 according to Old Mozilla Releases). They were around in less featureful incarnations back to 1996 or 1997, judging from what I see in CVS.

Remember, OmniWeb is one of the oldest browsers still around:

revision 1.1.1.1 date: 1994/02/16 21:53:53; author: kc; state: Exp; lines: +0 -0
Here's OmniWeb!

We love it when other browsers copy OmniWeb's features (and we've certainly copied features from other places). What is even better is that with WebCore/JavaScriptCore we have to spend less time futzing with web standards (if they can be called that) and can work on honest-to-goodness innovations.

A copy of Mozilla Firebird cause you can't rely on others to have anything except Internet Exploder installed...

As the other reply mentioned, this is off-topic.

But on the other hand, I run Linux on a p166mmx laptop /w 96mb ram.

I run Debian on it, with the Ion window manager and XFree86 3.3.6 (cos I don't like the glidepoint, and I use mostly console apps on it), but you could use IceWM, Blackbox or XFCE, all of which are in Debian Stable (Woody).

For a web browser I use Dillo mostly but Mozilla for some stuff (SSL etc). I don't use email on that machine though.

For productivity I have vim :P but AbiWord and Gnumeric would work okay I would imagine.

Basically, keep it sensible, and don't go for any memory intensive stuff (KDE / GNOME). Recompiling the kernel would help.

It's a nice laptop actually, apart from the HDD has a maximum transfer rate of 4mb/s, which is it's downpoint. Still, it's adequate for it's needs.

Martin

It's not free speech if you have no way to avoid it.

1. Don't use the Internet.

2. Use the Internet, but don't receive e-mail.

3. Receive e-mail, but only from certain addresses (i.e. whitelisting).

4. Receive e-mail, but only from servers that aren't listed in SPEWS or whatever (blacklisting).

5. Receive e-mail from anyone, but make them click a link or something to verify that they're real human beings and not spammers (self-whitelisting).

6. Receive all e-mail, but programmatically filter out spam (using e.g. Bayesian
statistical analysis).

7. Just delete spam when you receive it. I use this strategy on my account at home, and now that I'm over the initial outrage, it costs me less than a minute a day. Plus I got these great penis enlargement pills. They really work.

8. If you're a programmer, write an e-mail system that spammers can't abuse. People might like something like that. I bet they'd use it.

You have a very wide range of options. The fact that spammers are subhuman lowlifes doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to think before you say X form of communication "isn't speech".

Just what we all need,
Another Thunderbird Project

BTW, the Bugzilla bug is 97806, go have a look (there's no use linking, Bugzilla blocks /. referrals.)

Mozilla Bug for XForms Support

Favorite comment

Competitors include:

XWT

XUL

SCGUI (my pet)

does it run the GNU/Debian process?

One of the biggest problems with running Linux for non-geeks is configuration. Every app has its own .appnamerc or appname.conf with its own peculiar syntax and options. Now that we have a standard for filling out forms, we can build the infrastructure for a single front end to them all.

To enable Web content developers to meet these challenges XForms will be designed to cleanly distinguish between form instance data, form description (called the em>XForms Model), and form presentation (called the XForms User Interface).

When users can right-click on something, select Properties from the menu, and configure it in a consistent interface, one of the biggest impediments to Linux use by non-techies will be removed.

See the following bugzilla item for XForms support in Mozilla: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97806. There are also plugins available for some present browsers. See the implementations section of http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ for more info.

I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, Perl 5 is an extremely good language for quick scripting things. That's what it was designed for. Sure, you can do big projects in it, but it's not exactly ideal. Recently I've started using Ruby as well, and I intend to move my department over to it instead of wasting time with Perl 6.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

I think you should reserve judgement until there is an implementation. Otherwise sweeping statements like 'perl6 won't make development any faster' are pretty hard to justify or to disprove.

By all means attack perl5, or dismiss perl6 as vapourware.

FWIW, the huge ugly monster that is Mozilla seems to have turned out rather well in the end - it just took far too long to get there. It's not perfect, but it has succeeded in its own aims (be a portable web browser suited for everyday use).

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying.

Got it, Thanks. The bug for GUI access is 182274.

You may want to forward them over to Mozilla's own "why you should switch" page. it's pretty well done, but more important, finally shows that Mozilla is willing to do some marketing of their superior product!

Over 3 years and yet it's only "largely" done. Who's late again?

I haven't kept up with the reason why this bug is still unresolved or reopened -- bug 168174 could be the remaining problem. But the many comments there might show you that it's perhaps not as easy as it seems at first. Assuming you ever read html mail, what makes you so sure that any mailer is not "late" on this?

It is an official release -- it's even on the mozilla.org front page now. Here's the article I submitted to Slashdot (rejected):

Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 is available (download). Asa Dotzler explained the reason for this intermediate release: "Firebird 0.6 had two major flaws that have been fixed for a while now - the autocomplete crasher and the DOM security bug that broke most cool bookmarklets (and probably websites too). We _need_ to get these fixes into the hands of 0.6 users as soon as possible." Firebird 0.6.1 is based on the Mozilla 1.5 alpha branch, giving us time to avoid having major regressions in 0.6.1. If you're still using Internet Explorer, now is a great time to switch.

It is an official release -- it's even on the mozilla.org front page now. Here's the article I submitted to Slashdot (rejected):

Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 is available (download). Asa Dotzler explained the reason for this intermediate release: "Firebird 0.6 had two major flaws that have been fixed for a while now - the autocomplete crasher and the DOM security bug that broke most cool bookmarklets (and probably websites too). We _need_ to get these fixes into the hands of 0.6 users as soon as possible." Firebird 0.6.1 is based on the Mozilla 1.5 alpha branch, giving us time to avoid having major regressions in 0.6.1. If you're still using Internet Explorer, now is a great time to switch.

What I'd still like to see though, is the choice of "View message source" in the same submenu as Original html/Simple html/Plain text. Only seems natural, and would allow one to still navigate between source-view messages at a keystroke, instead of opening a new extraneous "source" window every time.

And make sure you download mozilla so that you can use the extensions!

Yay, do I get mod points for linking to a easily-Googled freaking website?

It has been released but the release notes just haven't been updated yet. See the files for enlightenment.

You clearly have not tried Mozilla's firebird browser. It is a lightweight version of Mozilla 1.4, and is much faster than IE, not to mention more secure. IE is bloated -- and the full extent of its bloat isn't known because of its integration with the Windows OS. To give you an Idea, IE has a footprint of 13,000+ Kilobytes in System memory, while Firebird (with 8 Tabb'd windows) only has 3,700 Kb of RAM as a footprint.

I don't think it's an official milestone, perhaps more of a release candidate, but test it out for the team anyway!

I'm a big Galeon fan, have been since early days, but am currently running 1.2.5, so I haven't seen the 1.3 problems. I also keep a fairly popular Nix Browser Reviews page.

I'm not much of a GNOME fan, and note the extensive GNOME deps as a misfeature of Galeon -- recently rediscovered as it turns out that some user.js prefs are ignored and need to be set through gconf instead (user-agent). Though I can see some benefits in principle, the results of GNOME in terms of the actual desktop are not to my personal liking. Fortunately, this doesn't get in the way of running WindowMaker instead.

There's a lot of assumed knowledge about the 1.3 issues in the interview. Could someone point to where this has been discussed?

Pitching my own $0.02: I've got lightweight browsers. I'm not looking for that in the niche Galeon currently fills. I'm also not looking for the fscking kitchen sink (browser, mail, news, composer...). A browser, but a solid browser, with user-friendly preferences, giving solid user control over presentation, privacy, security, with stability and decent performance. But wait, I already covered that rant....

If Galeon's seriously fscked up (and its slavish devotion to GNOME has always been more a detraction than a benefit), I'll be happy to move on. Pity losing a few years of accomodation, configuration, and utility.

Strongly recommend the core team listen to its users.

Of course, I'm sure companies will just see this situation as "Oh, I guess we need to put more advertisements on the web." As if there weren't already pop-up ads galore. Good thing that I haven't seen a pop-up ad in years, otherwise I'd be really annoyed. :-)

In the end, the internet is better than television at conveying things like information and/or news because it is much faster and more efficient. And I won't even begin to get into the more addictive side of the internet, such as online multiplayer games (*cough* Counterstrike *cough*) ;-)

Does anyone here seriously still use Internet Explorer? Why would you do that? It's not only a fucking wad of shit, it's also very easily replaced by something better.

$1550? That's nothing. Chump change.

The problem is not that QT/Win is not free-as-in-beer. The problem is that QT/Win is not Free-as-in-speech.

Trolltech released a Non-Commercial edition of QT/Win 2.3. The license basically said you couldn't make one thin dime off anything built with the Non-Comm edition, and since it was incompatible with the GPL, you had to add an exception to your license. Nobody took that license seriously, and Commercial license sales dropped. Trolltech was forced to end the line after that one release. (IMHO, had they gone GPL in the first place, they wouldn't have had that problem. The GPL gets respect.)

Not that you could find that out from their FAQs. You have to go digging through the QT-Interest mailing list archives. All the FAQ has is flippant sayings like "When Windows is completely Open Source...". Bah. Like Microsoft really cares about Trolltech. Windows-based developers are the only ones getting screwed.

In the end, Trolltech decided that "Windows compatible" and "Free/Open Source" are mutually exclusive. (Pay no attention to the cross-platform Open Source projects behind the curtain.)

But I'm not bitter.

That's kind of the whole point of the Camino Project. Why reinvent the wheel?

This will all be blindingly obvious to most readers of /., but just for the record:

Don't use your personal email address for anything online. Don't post to usenet with it, don't use it to register for anything, don't ever use it where there's any chance of it being sold to a third party or picked up by a web crawler. Use a free throwaway web-based account like hotmail or yahoo, that's what they're for. I have a verizon.net primary email address, and I've never received a single piece of spam from it.

However, I still have a forward-only email address from my university circa 1992. Back then, there was no spam and that address has to be on every spammer's list on the planet. I still get a legitimate email every year or two, but spam outnumbers these by at least 10,000 to 1. SpamAssassin does a surprisingly good job of identifying the garbage.

I also use a proxy to surf the web, as well as a large hosts file that reroutes requests to adservers to 127.0.0.1:80, combined with a utility that returns a transparent 1x1 gif to any request on port 80. And of course I use mozilla to block pop-ups and whatnot. I'm so used to surfing in this way that I always recoil in horror when I have to use IE on a naked, unprotected box. How on earth can anyone stand it?

As for more traditional types of spam such as telemarketers, there's the national do not call list. It's free, so there's nothing to lose. You'll also want to check out the many excellent resources at the Junkbusters website. One of the most useful features is a Junkbusters Declare page, which builds custom form letters for you that you can use to opt out of Direct Marketing Association junkmail, as well as telling your financial institutions, etc., not to sell your name to third parties. I used it, it's painless, and my privacy is protected.

Of course, it would be much better if we didn't have to jump through hoop after hoop just to get through the day without being pestered by morons.

OK I have submitted this to bugzilla. You can track it here.

Despite CRAM-MD5 being finally fixed, the amazingly obtuse way Mozilla handles secure IMAP is still there: You either use plain, unencrypted IMAP on port 143, or you use IMAPS over 993.

There's no STARTTLS support (on port 143) yet, which renders Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird useless in some ultra-paranoid corporate settings...

Vote for Bug 18574 if you want MNG support to come back in.

I've been seeing a lot of firebird checkins lately (past 3 weeks or so).

(Note, because Bugzilla blocks Slashdot referrers, you might have to copy the URL into the URL bar rather than click directly on it.)

As for faster -- I just restarted Mozilla 1.4 after having left it open for a week or two. It's about 3x the speed. How much of the speed improvement that you're noticing comes from restarting the browser?