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Amen brother! Don't forget about the download manager.

PS> Mozilla's Firebird project is working on speed/bloat issue.

With around 95% of the market it makes sense that Microsoft hasn't really been adding new features to Internet Explorer.

But I'd guess that with the growing dissatisfaction with pop-up advertising and the growing popularity of Mozilla's (or Firebird pop-up blocking they might have to rethink this soon.

I wish I didn't see the future so clearly sometimes, but I wrote the following a good few years back...

The "No problem Bugroff" license.

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation devised, in addition to some marvelous software, the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Or the CopyLeft it is sometimes called.

It is quite a revolutionary document, using the "copyright" tool to to protect your right to use free software.

Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.

In fact, various inconveniences relating to this have resulted in modifications such as the LGPL (Library General Public License) and more recently the NPL (Netscape Public License)

I call these matters mere inconveniences, the real damage will occur when the Jackal's, (sorry, I mean lawyers), actually get to test the GPL in court for the first time.

Thus enter my version.

Its very simple.

Entirely consistent.

Completely unrestrictive.

Easy to apply.

The "No problem Bugroff" license is as follows...

The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is....

Sure, No problem. Don't worry, be happy. Now bugger off.

All portions of this license are important..

• "Sure, no problem." Gives you complete freedom. I mean it. Utterly complete. A bit of a joke really. You have complete freedom anyway.
• "Don't worry, be happy." Apart from being good advice and a good song, it also says :- No matter what anyone else says or does, you still have complete freedom.
• Now bugger off. The only way to get rid of pushy Jackals is to ignore them and not feed them. The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court. Can't you just see it. Exactly the same thing that happened when some twit (not Linus) registered Linux as his own personal trademark. People got upset, started a fund, and hired, off all ruddy things, a Jackal to try and defend the chicken! Who really benefits from this trademark / patent / copyright thing anyway? The lawyers. Who made it up in the first place? The lawyers.

OK so the last part of the license sounds a bit harsh, but seriously folks, if you are a :-

• Lawyer asking these legalese questions... You should go off and learn an honest trade that will actually contribute to life instead of draining it.
• Programmer asking these legalese questions... You have amazingly powerful tools in your hands and mind, use them to ask and answer the worthwhile questions of life, the universe and everything. Stop mucking about with such legal nonsense and get back to programming.
• User/reader asking these question... Don't worry. Go off and be happy. Have fun. Enjoy what has been created for you.

• office suite
• browser
• mail client
• operating system

I suppose your point is that you don't want to switch email programs but I highly recommend Mozilla 1.4a.

Me too. I guess you could try Thunderbird which seems to have this feature, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

• Chandler, and
• ProChange

Try the mail application which comes as part of Mozilla - it has Bayesian spam filtering built in - details here

No, its been a part of Mozilla (the app suite) since 0.9.5 by default.

View>Show/Hide>Site Navigation bar.

I've since learnt the Opera version does a bit more than just look at link elements though. Apparently if it finds an anchor with the text "Next" it'll offer that link in the link toolbar. Kinda neat :)

If you were using Mozilla you could have picked from one of three stylesheets that he provides. Try orange - it looks really nice.

Thunderbird has a built-in autolearning spam filter. You just recieve your e-mail and when you see spam, mark it as such (by clicking the little 'Trash' Icon). And it is sent to the Junk folder and any future e-mail with similar structure will be blocked. As you mark e-mail as junk (or not junk) it learns and adapts. I have an almost 0% false-positive rate, and at least 95% catching rate. It uses the Bayesian algorythm.

Mozilla is very hack-friendly, most simple customizations like remapping the keyboard are found here. The deeper you get, the more technical the documentation becomes, but that is what is so great about open software like mozilla IMHO. If you ever have a need for that kind of information, it's there.. use software like IE and you're stuck with what your vendor provides.

I think that type-ahead-find in mozilla is a great feature as well, but it does kill off keyboard mappings in its current state. Hopefully when it becomes more mature it will require a leader for all searches or at least leave it as a preference to the user. I had remapped mozilla with a vi-like keyboard interface that worked out well until type-ahead-find came along. The only thing better than using hjkl for navigation is type-ahead-find in mozilla :P

real soon now = a couple days ago.

When viewing google search results, type "next" and enter to go to the next page of results. Or type "images" and enter to instead search for images that match your search. Etc. etc...

Besides being open source and having the C source availalbe, Mozilla contains approx 150,000 lines or 4.5mb (uncompressed) of javascript code. Its object hierarchy is very accessible and can be easily reconfigured. New modules can alter the existing set of javascript in infinite ways.

So, while it's likely harder to tweak Mozilla to exactly suit your needs, in the long run, it's much much more flexible than opera, and because it has a larger marketshare, its features will eventually easily surpass Opera's. Mozilla may always be a step behind in terms of speed, but in terms of features, it definitely won't.

Besides being open source and having the C source availalbe, Mozilla contains approx 150,000 lines or 4.5mb (uncompressed) of javascript code. Its object hierarchy is very accessible and can be easily reconfigured. New modules can alter the existing set of javascript in infinite ways.

So, while it's likely harder to tweak Mozilla to exactly suit your needs, in the long run, it's much much more flexible than opera, and because it has a larger marketshare, its features will eventually easily surpass Opera's. Mozilla may always be a step behind in terms of speed, but in terms of features, it definitely won't.

I don't know why you say 'tentatively', but it validates as HTML 4.01 strict , and if you visit with a compliant browser, that asks for xhtml 1.1, you are served xhtml 1.1 with a content-type of application/xhtml+xml. I'd welcome you to show me how it doesn't validate.

You probably saw html 4.01 content if you visted with konqueror, opera, or IE. Mozilla requests application/xhtml+xml as a higher priority than text/html.

Notes can't be, but that's not a huge loss in my humble opinion. There are possible better alternatives (notepad, vim, ...)

Mozilla's type ahead sounds far better than fast forward.

Everything else is supported in Mozilla...

Hmm, in my client, Mozilla, it works just fine. Perhaps you should upgrade ;)

-Vic

In the interest in preserving your clicking finger...

I use keyboard shortcuts, you insensitive clod!

Anyone else notice that 0.6 is not listed anywhere as being released on the Firebird project page? Is this release notice referring to the nightly build?

Did you RTFA? Check out why you should be using Firebird. It's in there.

this guy, asa is the kind of guy that will soon get thousands spam...is it really a good idea to write a news submitter's email address on /. homepage, without any *anti spam trick* ?

Actually, I use Mozilla Mail (available as part of the Mozilla Application Suite or standalone as Mozilla Thunderbird) which has amazing junk-mail controls so I'm not terribly worried :-)

--Asa

this guy, asa is the kind of guy that will soon get thousands spam...is it really a good idea to write a news submitter's email address on /. homepage, without any *anti spam trick* ?

Actually, I use Mozilla Mail (available as part of the Mozilla Application Suite or standalone as Mozilla Thunderbird) which has amazing junk-mail controls so I'm not terribly worried :-)

--Asa

this guy, asa is the kind of guy that will soon get thousands spam...is it really a good idea to write a news submitter's email address on /. homepage, without any *anti spam trick* ?

Actually, I use Mozilla Mail (available as part of the Mozilla Application Suite or standalone as Mozilla Thunderbird) which has amazing junk-mail controls so I'm not terribly worried :-)

--Asa

I was really interested in keywords support, but both links about it on the why page are broken. :(

I was really interested in keywords support, but both links about it on the why page are broken. :(

http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html

http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/newarchive/20 03_05_04_glazblogarc.html#s93853368

http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/composer/composer++. html

--Asa

I am simply saying that an application (Netscape 4.x) that was written over five years ago, and does pretty much the same thing as Mozilla, is a lot, lot faster.

Wrong. Netscape 4.x doesn't even come close to supporting web content as well as Mozilla. It simply doesn't do pretty much the same thing.

--Asa

i just removed explorer.exe from my taskbar and replaced it with firebird... (it's the only way i could stop myself starting explorer).

i've been meaning to wean myself off ms for a long time, so going to give this a real try.

suggestions for best non-outlook email program?

Yes, the Mozilla Thunderbird email client which has powerful junk-mail controls and all kinds of great privacy features.

--Asa

• For one, the tabbed browsing is vastly superior.
  • As noted, on a crash your tabs are saved (more important, when you close Opera, you can reopen precisely where you left off).
  • Links that pop up a new window show up as a new tab in Opera, but create a new frame in Mozilla (and Firebird).
  • If a page fails to load, Opera remembers the URL so you can try later. Mozilla leaves it as "about:blank" (Firebird may fix this, but I can't find a page that fails to load right now).
  • Closing a tab will change your current tab to be either last created or last viewed (user can select this). Mozilla/Firebird selects the neighboring tab to the right.
  • Forward/Prev tab is '1' or '2' on the keyboard.
• Single-key functions are much better IMO than type-ahead-find: 'z' for back, 'x' for forward, and g for turning graphics off (with many more) -- and type-ahead find is available in a search box, by default Shift+F7 takes you there.
• "View Source" is easily configurable, and I can use my preferred editor. The mozilla group can't decide whether that should be allowed.

This has been filed as a feature request with Moz, but is ranked as very low priority: see bug 41975.

A possible hack to get around all this would be if CSS attached a pseudo attribute to all elements specifying the page URI. This would allow you to use the CSS2 specification stuff ( e.g. [obj_uri~='gamespot'] ) to solve the problem.

If you want something that works on the fly, I think it can be done building a bookmarklet that executes javascript to embed CSS... small reference here. I had a much better page, but I can't find it now, sorry!

When I looked at the Firebird feature page, the first thing I remember is one argument Gates (or was it Ballmer?) used against Open Source: Open Source offers no innovation.

Now compare Firebird to IE which has been stagnant for years, ever since Netscape went down. IE takes a severe beating from any other updated browser today in the feature department.

Where's the closed-source innovation, huh guys?

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/why/
http://gemal.dk/mozilla/mozdev.html

To 'Do Not Ask On Startup' problem is on the list of known issues, on the release page

Hopefully they'll fix that problem quickly - it's sure any annoying bug.

Obviously, you haven't read the release notes.

If you had read the Mozilla Roadmap, you would know that there is already plans on integrating Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird. They will also share the same Gecko Runtime Environment, which means less memory footprint and better performance.

If you had read the Mozilla Roadmap, you would know that there is already plans on integrating Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird. They will also share the same Gecko Runtime Environment, which means less memory footprint and better performance.

If you had read the Mozilla Roadmap, you would know that there is already plans on integrating Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird. They will also share the same Gecko Runtime Environment, which means less memory footprint and better performance.

Please be aware that there is an extremely nasty Macromedia Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6. If you use Flash or Flash-oriented web sites as extensively as I do, this bug makes Mozilla Firebird 0.6 completely unuseable. To get true Macromedia Flash support in Mozilla Firebird under Windows, you need to create a few registry keys. Normally, this worked fine until the releases starting a few days ago. However, now when you make the registry keys and install Macromedia Flash, it appears to work correctly, but as soon as you re-open Mozilla Firebird, it reverts to the old Netscape "Classic" theme, and adds a few new toolbars such as Help, and QA. Absolutely *nothing* works under this corrupted Mozilla Firebird, rendering Mozilla Firebird 0.6 completely useless. For more information on this nasty bug, please see this Bugzilla entry.

So, right now I use both Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird, and I see the little Mozilla offsprings dethroning parent Mozilla very soon.

The Developers have stated this will happen

I used the Opera 7.1 beta for GNU/Linux for a couple of weeks and find that it loses out to Firebird in the following areas:

• It is does not have type ahead find .
• It does not have as sophisticated cookie and image blocking facilities.
• You cannot limit the functionality of Javascript in ways that Firebird provides.
• It is no faster than Firebird 0.5 or 0.6 in any respect.
• It has an annoying advertisement.
• It does not work well with Java applets (for me atleast).

The first 3 points are the major reason I chose to stick with Mozilla Firebird. Plus, you get a number of cool extensions for Firebird which you can install at a click of a button.

I found that the Tab management in Opera 7.1 was superior that Firebird's out of the box. But there is an extension called "Tabbrowser extensions" which make Firebird Tabs behave as well as Opera.

I for one don't see a reason to spend good money on Opera given that Firebird exists.

... what are hte main differences between Mozilla and Firebird and why do they seem to be advocating one of their products over another?

If you are asking about the difference between the current Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Firebird Browser then it's basically a directional change.
Read the Mozilla Road Map to see why this is being done.

The difference between Mozilla, in gerneral, and Firebird is that one is a web browser and one is a RDBMS.

And the Mozilla crowd said people wouldn't confuse the two....

Use the source Luke!

That is, Mozilla and Linux may be distributed together, but you can't take any substantial code from Mozilla and use it to make Gimp better.

Mozilla licensing is a "dual" (or even "triple") license scheme... to quote:

At the moment, parts of the source are available under either the Netscape Public License (NPL) or the Mozilla Public License (MPL), often in combination with either the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), or both. mozilla.org is working towards having all the code in the tree licensed under a MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license

20 to 1? I don't know what you are talking about. Perhaps you post your address everywhere you go. My spam/mail ration is exactly the opposite and I achieve that by registering to unimportant internet services with fake accounts or alternative accounts. The rest is handled by mozilla mailnews bayesian spam filtering. Popups are handled by mozilla just as well. Sure one popup occasionally gets through but it's no biggie.

Is it harder to get independent news sources? Judging from slashdot's sources, it seems rather the opposite. Most of the stuff I read here would have been impossible to report/know/learn without the internet. I realize you are not talking about tech news, so why isn't there a successful general interest news site using the /. model? Perhaps because the need is not there yet. I find and obtain plenty of sources, most importantly I can find primary sources (judges' opinions, congressional debates, and what not), stuff that was unthinkable 10 years ago. And guess what I a use a browser to read them. Alternative means are welcome but I don't see any reason for pessimism here.

3. Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Phoenix and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.

A few complaints from the Firebird database crew (and a few seemingly hollow threats of legal action, which they'd have been much better off not saying at all), but most are happy with the outcome <snip />

There would not be a conflict if Mozilla were to use the actual trademark "Mozilla Firebird".

From the Firebird Browser Project Page:

2003-05-04: New release soon

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (Glendale) should be released soon, possibly within a week or so.

I actually considered pre-authoring a release story to try to submit it to Slashdot ASAP after its release but quickly realized my life isn't that empty. I downloaded the latest nightly instead; very nice and stable, and many glitches from March nightlies are gone including the hard-to-drag links.

I'll just grep my old post and add in Firebird with Phoenix.

Please, everyone keep in mind that the naming situation wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the Phoenix and FirebirdSQL people hadn't made such a big deal in the first place.

The big, bloated, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Mozilla that you download from mozilla.org is called Seamonkey.
However, nobody ever refers to it as Seamonkey - it's just Mozilla. Phoenix/Firebird was just being referred to directly as Phoenix/Firebird until Seamonkey could be retired and the rest of the developers could move over to the new codebase (which is due to happen in the next ). At that point it would've been "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail & News" again (as far as we end-users are concerned).

If Phoenix and FirebirdSQL hadn't flipped out and had just waited a few months the "Phoenix/Firebird Browser" would probably have been forgotten.