Mozilla Firebird Soars Into View

About a zillion people wrote to announce Mozilla 0.6, but asa was the first: "Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (formerly Phoenix) is available for download. This release features a fresh new look, a redesigned preferences window, preliminary support for Mac OS X and much more. Read why you should be using Mozilla Firebird and get the latest release." I'm not exactly clamoring for a new web browser, but it looks worth checking out.

Comments

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if this works under FreeBSD Linux emulation? Or (preferably) when the native version will be out?

Re:FreeBSD

[AmunRa]

Use the source Luke!

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the parent post was marked funny because of the enormous time required to compile mozilla...

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Enormous? My computer compiled Mozilla 1.3 in about 2 hours. The whole new KDE + Qt took about three times that.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it works great under linux emulation on FreeBSD

http://screamingelectron.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.ph p? t=292

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be done. And on FreeBSD, it can be done easily. The port will be updated sooner or later, if it hasn't already been updated.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

What a shock that an entire graphical toolkit, desktop environment, and office suite takes longer to compile than a web browser.

Re:FreeBSD

[shellbeach]

Use the source Luke!

Seriously, I find this a big problem: Firebird has never (apart from a short time in February (I think) for the nightly builds) released a tarball of the source used to make either (a) the stable releases or (b) the nightly builds.

Grabbing code from CVS really isn't the same, since it's changing all the time - at the very least the stable releases should have a snapshot of the relevant parts of the CVS tree at the time the binaries were compiled. And AFAIK you can't use CVS with a proxy server ...

Re:FreeBSD

[asa]

"Grabbing code from CVS really isn't the same, since it's changing all the time"

So pull the release tag.

--Asa

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should he have to pull CVS again?

Fix it.

Opera

[dbglt]

Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery :P

Anyone wanna point out to me some features that firebird has/plans on having? Most of the ones on the list look pretty basic...

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Opera on windows, linux and embedded linux. Firebird is much more enjoyable, stable, quick and pleasant to use. The only reason I still use Opera is embedded linux support -- but etfrot has a workable alternative.

Re:Opera

[mrd_yaddayadda]

I'm an Operaphile. Straight up front I'll say that but from my very very brief look at Firebird (.6) I'm impressed. One of the things I can't live without in Opera are the mouse gestures. I know that there has been a - imo - rather crappy implementation of the idea available for Mozilla for a while but it seems that it's finally getting there.

I tried previous releases of Phoenix and while I thought it promising it always has seemed very rough around the edges understandably but this seems to be getting close. Allied with Thunderbird this could be a good mix...

Worth trying for a while at least.

Re:Opera

[J_DarkElf]

The only advantage I see in having a XUL-based browser is that it is quite easy to add extensions to it, such as support for additional standards such as Ruby, or adding support for features left out of the main distribution, such as the 'site navigation' () bar.

Standards support is virtually identical in Gecko and Presto -- Presto does certain things a little better, Gecko has support for SVG and some other things Presto does not yet support. Unless you for some reason need SVG and MathML support, I do not see any reason to move to MF from Opera. But of course that is my opinion ;-)

Alas The Browser Formerly Known As Phoenix is still at least twice as slow as Opera 7.11 on my system, so it will remain a secondary browser for me. It is certainly at least the second-best browser around!

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it has replication mechanisms, fully Ansi 92 sql and non locking commits :-)

Re:Opera

[theprancinghorse]

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.

Re:Opera

[Bander]

I was one of the Opera faithful for a couple of years, but switched to Phoenix/Mozilla Firebird about six months ago and haven't looked back since.

Opera started losing favor when the Daily Python site kept coming up in Greek (not that there's anything wrong with that, I just can't read Greek) and their tech support was completely unhelpful.

Mozilla Firebird is close to everything a browser should be. And nothing more, which is at least as important.

-- Bander

Re:Opera

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Well, if you want mouse gestures, you can always get StrokeIt. It adds mouse gestures to Windows as a whole. Essentially, it recognizes a gesture and performs a macro based on which gesture it was and which application is active. It can even do global gestures like close, minimize all, and restore all.

http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, bub. 'the firebird' was a ballet, not an opera.

Re:Opera

[grayrest]

If you don't see what you're looking for, check the extension page at Firebird Help. Otherwise, ask in the Mozillazine Forums, which are linked in a dozen places.

The whole point of firebird is that different people want different things from their browsers. A web neophyte and a web developer will have different requirements. With the extension mechanism, the needs of both can be satisfied.

For example, my setup looks like this. The features shown there are a mix between built in mozilla features and extensions, several of which I've either created or tweaked.

The features they list are pretty pedestrian, but since it's pretty easy to create extensions, a lot of interesting functionality is being created. I believe that the creativity of extension makers will be a key source of innovation for web browsers and the ideas that are currently in development will be listed as key features of mozilla in the future.

Finally, I personally would keep using firebird even if IE or Opera duplicated the functionality of everything in Fb including the extensions. Why? If I want to have a new feature in Fb, I sit down and hack it out. If a feature is almost right, I dive into the source and tweak it. Mozilla interface code is really easy to hack and that is very valuable to me and something that Opera lacks.

Re:Opera

[Jugalator]

I just tried out Firebird, but noticed it still doesn't support the mouse wheel properly. You don't seem to be able to scroll up/down after pressing the middle button. Just scroll with the wheel, but that's kinda tedious. I'm aware of the AutoScroll plugin (autoscroll.mozdev.org), but I read that he was looking for others to take over his project and also that 1.4 broke the support although someone had submitted a fix. The problem is that I remember it as a bit buggy, and if he has little time to spend on that project, it could mean I'd have to live without such a basic feature. So I'm sticking to Opera 7.11 for now, for this and other (greater speed and lots other minor features) reasons.

Re:Opera

[grayrest]

All In One Gestures: Works well enough IMHO

Re:Opera

[Phwoar]

I haven't yet tried 0.6 but on my pc 0.5 takes 6 seconds to open for the first time, opera takes 2. Not a massive difference, but it still lives up to the ole 'fastest' claim I recon. That said, I prefer firebird and will probably be using it solely in future. The main thing that get's on my nerves at the moment is the inability to set 'target=_blank' like links open in a new tab instead of a new window.

Re:Opera

[wtmoose]

These links were posted to slashdot recently. My favorite feature is type-ahead links. I find it very useful when I'm browsing news headline links or looking for that damn "TV" link on Yahoo.com. There's another cool feature where you can type something like "dict something" and it looks up something for you in the dictionary.

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

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Phoenix still takes forever to load (just like Mozilla) but the good news - it won't eventually expand to fill all your free memory (like Opera, which currently takes ~50MB with two windows open on my machine) and it's hella faster at rendering pages - even Opera 6 isn't this fast.
Try it. See the difference. I'm keeping Opera 7 tho..

Re:Opera

[theprancinghorse]

I donot know precisely about 'target = _blank' links, but you can try the 'TabBrowser' extension. With that, you can make firebird operate solely in a single window mode, just like Opera.. That should solve your problem.

Re:Opera

[bigberk]

Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery :P

I was a dedicated Opera users (I also bought it). But I've switched to Phoenix/Firebird because it works just as well as Opera and has some added advantages - the tabbed browsing, prevention of popups and especially the mozilla engine (I find there are fewer HTML rendering glitches).

Opera is still faster though. However I am very happy with Firebird. My only gripe was that it was easy to crash (at least on win32, using drop down lists like in search engines) but maybe they have fixed that now?

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but the problem with that is that middle clicks do something else in Firebird. They open links in a new tab in the background, which is way, way, way more useful (especially considering autoscroll puts an autoscroll icon usually in the way of whatever you're reading). Now maybe right button and middle click at the same time or something for autoscroll would fix that, but the middle click/new background tab is so astonishingly useful at browing the web in the way I and lots of other users do that I think it should take precedence, and screw what IE does.

Re:Opera

[hkmwbz]

"It is does not have type ahead find ."

Yes it does. Only it is called "inline find". Opera actually had inline find before Mozilla had type ahead find.

Re:Opera

[janaagaard]

I think that the Gecko engine renders HTML-pages with advanced CSS a little better than Opera. There's virtually no difference between Internet Explorer and Firebird*. And let's face it: IE is the de facto standard. I'm talking really suttle differences, like font-sizes, and default paddings, that are not completely the same when comparing Opera and IE.

*) The only differences I'm annoied with is the fact that IE doesn't put at top-margin on paragraphs and the likes and Gecko does. The font-size for input-fields aren't the same. And if you use percentages for font-sizes they are accumulated in IE, but not in Gecko.

The main reason I use Firebird is because of the impressive pop-up-blocker. It works much better than the add-ons for IE that I've tested. Dunno what Opera has to offer here, though.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Rejoice

Cheers,

--fred

Re:Opera

[JamochasWitness]

I fell in love with Opera from the get-go. Unfortunately, it does not have as good Javascript support as Phoenix. Also, it seems to crash a lot with PC-Cillin web agent running (I can't prove this, but I ran my PC for a week without PC-Cillin and all went well. Then as soon as I started PC-Cillin up again, it consistently crashed).

Re:Opera

[John_Booty]

Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery :P

Opera was my favorite browser, I used and paid for it up until 6.02 or so. Since then I converted to Mozilla for a brief while, and then to Phoenix/Firebird.

Directly comparing Firebird to Opera... Interface-wise they're very close, with tabs, mouse gestures, etc. Performance-wise, they're both very good, although I suspect that on slightly older hardware Opera would have the edge.

I think what I *didn't* like about Opera was the integration of mail, browser, kitchen sink, etc, into one package. Some people *like* that and it's fine, just personal preference. They did a great job cramming all that stuff into Opera while keeping size/performance nice, but... well, it's still crammed in. I like separate, simple programs.

Also Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird seemed to render pages better than Opera6. It was a combination, I think, of the Gecko engine handling quirky pages better, as well as having more complete standards support. Supposedly this has been improved in Opera 7, though I like Firebird so much I haven't even tried Opera 7.

Re:Opera

[drew]

i've been hearing opera's standards support being praised for like a year or two now, and i've always wondered on what basis. while opera's css implementation seems solid from what i've seen, the dom implementation in even the newest version of opera seems to me to be significantly lacking in comparison even to browsers as old as ie 5.5 and mozilla since around the time of netscape 6.

i may be wrong about the overall level of standards compliance, but to this day, opera does not work correctly with document.createElement() and document.body.appendChild(), which (for my uses at least) has made any further testing impossible and irrelevant.

Re:Opera

[theprancinghorse]

Yes it does. Only it is called "inline find". Opera actually had inline find before Mozilla had type ahead find.

How do I use inline find? For type ahead find, all I have to do is start typing the text of the link I want to visit and that link is automatically highlighted. Then I can press enter to visit it..

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

...especially the mozilla engine (I find there are fewer HTML rendering glitches).

Do you mean Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine, which Opera uses in all its recent versions. Mozilla has other support for things like the DOM which may cause some pages to appear differently.

Re:Opera

[kbielefe]

I agree with you wholeheartedly about the middle clicking opening a link taking precedence. I use it all the time. However, you wouldn't need to do some weird button combination to activate autoscroll instead in this case. If you middle click on a link, open link in a new tab. If you middle click off of a link, activate the autoscroll. Simple as that.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading this article, I decided to try the latest version of Opera, version 7.11 for Windows.

It blew me away! It renders pages much faster, and the cache seems to work much better.
The interface is also very good looking,
with some very nice animations and colors.

The two things I don't like so far is that

#1 it costs money(or ads)
#2 I don't need a mail client

Re:Opera

[emarkp]

I've been an Opera user since 6.0. In most ways I find it superior to Mozilla, though Firebird makes some improvements.

• 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.

My biggest complaint about Opera is that it ignores my synaptics touchpad side-scroll function (dragging finger along the edge of the touchpad acts like a mousewheel). Also, it seems to crash a lot (though I tend to keep it up for days at a time--so it's at least more stable than Win9X).

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Moz* has "nuke image" extension that can be installed. With that, you can remove advertisements from web pages, unless they are flash.

Re:Opera

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Plus, there are a whole buncha gesture extensions for Phoenix. They work flawlessly, and are of course free. Having used pretty much every fully-developed browser, I have completely settled of Phoenix: It's simple, it's fast, it's incredibly customizable, and plus, it's good for the soul.

Anyway, that URL for mouse gesture extensions was:

http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html

Cheers,
~Tris

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

In Opera go to Edit->check Inline find. After that, just press Ctrl+F and start typing :)

Re:Opera

[mkozlows]

The biggest difference for me is that Firebird's interface is a lot cleaner than Opera's, that Firebird's core engine is more standards-compliant (DOM Events Level 2 don't work at all in Opera, for instance), and that Firebird is free. There may be little reason to switch to Firebird from Opera (better the devil you know, and all), but if you're an IE user, Firebird is the alternative browser of choice.

Re:Opera

[kfx]

Gotta agree there, middle-click tab opening is amazingly convenient... I just happend to stumble on it a few weeks ago when I was tweaking my prefs! Another thing I stumbled on is middle-clicking on a tab closes it, even if it's in the background! No more needing to right-click and slap the menu to open or close tabs anymore!

Re:Opera

[AlexMax2742]

Um...there is no reason why you can't use both. I do, and I'm very happy with them.

(In fact I just downloaded the newest opera version, and I'm planning to upgrade Phoenix...errr...Firebird sometime today. I used IERadicate to get rid of IE, and my Win98 system has been relatively stable ever since...)

Re:Opera

[a8f11t18]

Each time there's a new firebird/pheonix version, I try it out. Each time I go back to good old opera, now up at 7.11 and as good as ever. Sure, I can do most of the stuff I do with opera with firebird too, but opera does all the small things right that firebird often doesn't manage just quite right, IMO, and has lots more polish if you ask me.

Re:Opera

[a8f11t18]

The reason is that opera is a better browser :)
Or why else do you think we would actually PAY for
a browser? :) We don't turn computers into politics
too much, we just want to use the best. And at the
moment that is Opera. IMHO of course. And yes, i try
each new version of pheonix.. not good enough.

You could do something similar with inline find, or
you could use spatial navigation (shift+arrow key to
navigate through links).

Opera 4ever.

Re:Opera

[critter_hunter]

You haven't used Opera 7, obviously. DOM support is rock solid, and it supports most non-standard javascript as well.

Read the Standard support page to get an idea of Opera's standards support. It's pretty darn great.

Add to that all the neat, neat features (besides mouse gestures and excellent keyboard navigation, they also make the best use of stylesheets and page relations (link rel=next, etc) I've ever seen.) and you got a great goodness.

Re:Opera

[ergo98]

Brilliant application, thanks for pointing it out. I'm a huge fan of Opera, so adding this to the whole OS is pretty sweet. I'm very surprized I haven't heard about this app before.

Re:Opera

[joshwa]

Autoscroll extension

Re:Opera

[ubernostrum]

Favorite feature Firebird already has that Opera doesn't and never will: no cost, no ads.

Re:Opera

[Repugnant_Shit]

Edit->Inline Find. Then when you hit CTRL+F you can just start typing. It was an unofficial option since Opera 6, maybe earlier.

Re:Opera

[jesser]

Edit->Inline Find. Then when you hit CTRL+F you can just start typing. It was an unofficial option since Opera 6, maybe earlier.

How do you follow a link you find while doing inline find in Opera? I tried Tab, Enter, Ctrl+Down, and none of them worked. The great thing about typeahead find in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird is that it lets you follow links from the keyboard with very little typing.

Mozilla and MF also let you choose whether to search for all text or just link text (press '/' first or just start typing), but that's not as important as being able to follow links once you find them.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like there is a plugin (extension) for it here. Haven't tried it out yet though.here

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

please can you enlighten me how did you make that menu bar is on a right of button bar?

i would be grateful

Re:Opera

[SimplexO]

View -> Toolbars -> Customize.

Drag your buttons up to the menu, and put them to the left of the actual menu buttons.

Re:Opera

[steveha]

f you middle click on a link, open link in a new tab. If you middle click off of a link, activate the autoscroll. Simple as that.

And, in fact, Galeon has already implemented this in exactly the way you describe.

Plus, as a bonus, if you select a URL and then middle-click on the "New Tab" button on the toolbar, it will open a new tab with that URL loaded! I really love that.

steveha

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually i used to be a opera cultsman but i converted to firebird aka Phoenix quite sometime ago....

If u want gestures or quite a bunch of other functionalities then u can to this site http://www.texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html

And for gestures All-in-one gestures is best and it gives complete custmizbility so check it out.....

Re:Opera

[yerricde]

If you middle click on a link, open link in a new tab. If you middle click off of a link, activate the autoscroll. Simple as that.

How does one "middle click off a link" when the link covers the whole page, such as when the link is a large image?

Re:Opera

[hyeh]

An Autoscroll extension is available for Mozilla and Firebird. The URL is here.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has tab browsing. Even better than Firebird.

Re:Opera

[frause]

but... but... I use middleclick "off a link" to paste an URL into the browser window. I use that more often than you would think.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I as a Opera fan and customer since 5.x , decided not to speak about mozilla anymore. Generates unneeded amount of flames, waste of time.

Everyone use whatever they feel good with...

Re:Opera

[a8f11t18]

but opera has spatial navigation.. just hold in shift and press the arrow keys to navigate through the links.. easy.

Re:Opera

[juhaz]

Middleclick to paste doesn't work on win32 (AFAIK, someone correct me if I'm wrong, and tell how to activate the damn thing, it's very useful), and most people who want autoscroll are probably on win32 anyway, so just make it default for windows version and maybe a pref for other OS'es.

Re:Opera

[sepluv]

If you middle click on a link, open link in a new tab. If you middle click off of a link, activate the autoscroll. Simple as that.

And that is exactly how it does work when you install the autoscroll extension in MFB.

Re:Opera

[juhaz]

As noted, on a crash your tabs are saved (more important, when you close Opera, you can reopen precisely where you left off).

Group of open tabs can be saved as bookmark folder and opened in tabs again later (I'm not sure if this is feature of tabbrowser extension, mozilla or only firebird)

Doesn't work in crash prevention, nor does it ask whether or not to save automagically when closing, or automagically open when starting, but otherwise I think they're easier to manage than "sessions", and enable you to only open one of the saved sites instead of all if so wanted.

Links that pop up a new window show up as a new tab in Opera, but create a new frame in Mozilla (and Firebird).

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.

Tabbrowser extension can do these two.

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).

Doesn't work in firebird either. You're right, this one is annoying.

Forward/Prev tab is '1' or '2' on the keyboard.

This would break type-ahead find. Besides I think the mozilla default ctrl-page up/down for next/previous and ctrl + [1-9] for tab 1,2,...9 is better anyway.

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.

I prefer type-ahead find. After using for a while, no living without anymore... And operas version seems inferior anyawy (eg. no searching only links, one of the most useful properties of taf).

"View Source" is easily configurable, and I can use my preferred editor. The mozilla group can't decide whether that should be allowed.

Dunno. Most of the time I just want to view the damn source. And mozillas viewer is quite good. Who cares if it takes whole two seconds more to save the page and open the editor when you actually want to edit it (about one in hundred, maybe)?

Re:Opera

[drew]

actually i have used opera 7, but only briefly.

i must apologize (a little). my initial impression was that it just didnt work, however, upon closer inspection, it seems document.createElement() does work in opera 7, however, something doesnt work when using it to create <iframe> or <img> objects.

opera doesnt give me any errors at all- it just doesnt work. it might be possible that this is something that i am doing incorrectly, but i dont know what. for that i blame the fact that i have yet to find a good dom reference other than this one as msdn.

Re:Opera

[critter_hunter]

To get your JavaScript errors you need to go to Window/Special/JavaScript console. There is an option in the preferences to automatically open the console on JavaScript errors, but it is off by default.

The DOM support listed on the page is probably for 7.11. There have been lots of improvement to JavaScript support since 7.0

Great Work

[mbrod]

I would just like to say good job to the developers and the project managers. The direction this part of Mozilla has gone has really put the icing on the cake for it being the best browser IMHO.

I use it Phoenix (ermmm I mean Firebird) now on every platform at work and at home. Love it.

Never have any popup problems, very quick and couldn't do without opening links in the background under a new tab as I browse the web then go to them when I am done reading what I am currently on.

Re:Great Work

[sisukapalli1]

Just a few weeks ago, I felt that Mozilla was good enough and that there was no need to try anything else -- till I downloaded Mozilla Firebird (some nightly after 0.5), and boy is it good...

Here are the main things:

The customization is tremendous. I managed to shave off a couple of toolbars from the screen -- only one toolbar with more buttons and options than what I put with Mozilla 1.4b.

The extensions are wonderful too. Simple things like NukeImage, Tabbrowser extensions, Adblock, and a tonne of other extensions.

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

Soon it will be the time to say, "The king is dead, long live the king."

S

Re:Great Work

[Proneax]

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

Re:Great Work

[blurfus]

Ditto to that...

I have been using Mozilla for a couple of years now and decided to download Firebird (Phoenix 0.4 at the time) to try it out.

I must say I am very pleased. It has a simpler, get-to-the-point interface that's is highly customizable not to mention the much-smaller, simpler installer (around 6MB)

If I understand correctly, there will be (or are already) tons of plug-ins for it to do things like mouse gestures, and such.
I know you already can block pop-up windows, do image re-sizing, and skin the browser with your favourite theme(s) but these are considered 'standard' nowadays.

I am pretty sure I will be using this browser more often and eventually replacing any other on my desktop.

Re:Great Work

[alanjstr]

That's exactly what is planned to happen for Mozilla 1.5. http://texturizer.net/firebird/faq.html#5.1

Re:Great Work

[Anonymous Coward]

I find one major difference between Galeon and Mozilla. Mozilla's stable. Of course, with Mozilla, you still get that damned unworkable "/" search feature that is specially designed to lock the browser up for several minutes and do little else. Wish they'd cut down on the bloat.

Re:Great Work

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Moz* will allow you to go to F-11 fullscreen on any tab, by itself.
Other tabs are not affected by F-11 (unless you want some of them fullscreen too.

Re:Great Work

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude what the FUCK are you talking about? Moron.

Re:Great Work

[littleRedFriend]

Yes, I tried Firebird as well. Love it, loads much faster than Mozilla. No bloat (that I won't use).

Openoffice.org take a long and good look at what is happening here! Faster loading time, clean interface. Focus on what's important.

Re:Great Work

[dr.badass]

Of course, this means that those of us that like Mozilla are pretty much fucked, right?

I used Phoenix off and on since it came out, but when I started using Mozilla, there was just no comparison. Phoenix feels like a toy next to it, but apparently that's what makes it so popular.

I'm utterly bewildered as to why they intend to effectively kill Mozilla in favor of this. I can understand (in reading the new roadmap), focusing on a common runtime, but why must they kill off Mozilla to do so?

I wouldn't mind so much if the two browsers actually felt the same, but they don't, and given the direction Phoenix has moved in in the last two milestones, it doesn't seem like it's going to become any more Mozilla-like.

Re:Great Work

[Anonymous Coward]

He's talking about the fact that all of the work that went into certain parts of Mozilla (XPFE, the whole of Composer and the Address Book, and ChatZilla, and many other things) is going to go to waste just because some fucktards think that Phoenix is cool.

Once again : A LOT OF HARD WORK IS GOING TO GO TO WASTE BECAUSE THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE ARE IDIOTS.

Re:Great Work

[Anonymous Coward]

The direction this part of Mozilla has gone has really put the icing on the cake for it being the best browser IMHO.

The trouble is, it's at the expense of the original browser. They've spent all this time whipping up a new browser and re-implementing the same damn features, when they could have focused on addressing the few problems Mozilla has.

Never have any popup problems, very quick and couldn't do without opening links in the background under a new tab as I browse the web then go to them when I am done reading what I am currently on.

That's funny, I can do all that, but I could have sworn I was using Mozilla. Oh, wait, I am.

Re:Great Work

[juhaz]

The extensions are wonderful too. Simple things like NukeImage, Tabbrowser extensions, Adblock, and a tonne of other extensions.

Why are people always giving credit for the extensions specifically to phoenix/fb? It's not like they're something new and unique here, Mozilla has got 'em for ages, and most extensions (like all you mentioned) work just as well in both fb/moz.

And some that only work on fb are only putting stuff that IS ALREADY in Mozilla back to Firebird.

Re:Great Work

[ealar dlanvuli]

Soon it will be the time to say, "The king is dead, long live the king."

Hehe I said that at Phoenix 0.4

It's great.

[The J Kid]

I've got it and it's great.

It's fast, zippy and speedy too!
If you haven't been using the Nightlies lately, the new default theme will seem to you as a breath of fresh air.

It's hands down the best browser for Linux.

Font Magnification

[Teckla]

For those of us without electron microscopes handy to read the tiny, tiny fonts on many web pages, Mozilla/Mozilla Firebird also allows text magnification that *always works*.

There are tons of web pages whose text can't be magnified in Internet Explorer without first turning on the accessibility options, and doing that is very annoying.

-Teckla

Re:Font Magnification

[dbglt]

This is hardly ground-breaking - this has been around since the early days of opera (not that long ago :) Just because IE doesn't offer it... it does not make firebird/whatever they want to call it now/and now better

Re:Font Magnification

[Stuart Gibson]

As of course does Opera (and has done for some considerable time). Of course, Opera can magnify everything (including images) for those with poor eyesight or for, ahem, closer inspection of thumbnails.

Alternatively, you can specify the minimum size of font you will accept (in pixels) which means you never need to magnify text as anything specified above the size will stay as the author intended, yet small text won't drop below your specified limit.

Yes, I know you need to pay for Opera and not Phoenix/Firebird, but that's fine. No need to start a holy war, just passing on the information :)

Goblin

Re:Font Magnification

[gratefully dead]

True. I love Mozilla because it seems to render stuff very well, especially if you have a good font setup.

But it seems weird how this version of mozilla is being shamelessly promoted. That being said, let me check if there is an ebuild yet...

Re:Font Magnification

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

But it seems weird how this version of mozilla is being shamelessly promoted.

I think they're just trying to creat a bit of buzz... it keeps people focused and makes things that bit more exciting! More power to 'em I say!

Re:Font Magnification

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I was getting ready to say except all of this stuff is already in Opera. From the article I read

"Tab-Browsing is a revolutionary enhancement to browsing the internet. Mozilla Firebird brings you the simplest, most intuitive version of Tab Browsing you will find. "

I'm not sure how long Opera has had this, but I've been using middle click for a year and not even so much as a mention of Opera while insuinating Moz created this idea

I hope Firebird does as well as the next guy but lets be honest opera has been trailblazing browser technology for years and they deserve more credit. I can understand a business trying to make money not giving credit because they're competing for dollars so it pays to mis-inform, but for a bunch of hackers you'd think it wouldn't matter. This kind of stuff reminds me of a large west coast company. sorry
of course this will be modded as troll because I'm not sticking my head in the sand and spreading fud. It's a shame I have to post as AC just to be honest.
well i'm off to download firebird cause even though Opera is my browser for years mozilla was always better and rendering webpages like ESPN and other MSN 'partners'.

Re:Font Magnification

[jefu]

Now if only there were a way to specify (when needed) that I want the background to be white and the text black.

These pages with black background and purple text are rather less than readable on my old monitor (which seems to be slowly seeking a zen like quality of middlin grey for all colors).

Yup, there's a preference to do this uniformly, but I'd rather not do it unless I need to - which often means page specific.

Re:Font Magnification

[sgarrity]

Nice indeed. For those that like simple control over the font sizes, I recommend the Trivial extension which lets you add font size controls to the toolbar.

Re:Font Magnification

[Pres. Ronald Reagan]

Passing on information... in a story about Firebird? Quite frankly, jackass, no one cares if your shitty browser can do things half as well as Mozilla/Firebird for infinitely more money.

Why doesn't someone mod this guy as flamebait?

Re:Font Magnification

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I've been discussing a similar problem with some friends - specifically, we want to tag specific sites with custom CSS stylesheets, in an enhanced form of what mozilla already allows globally.

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!

Re:Font Magnification

[ryanvm]

As of course does Opera (and has done for some considerable time).

Man, you Opera guys are getting to be as annoying as the Mac users.

Re:Font Magnification

[stefanlasiewski]

And the Gentoo users :)

Re:Font Magnification

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, yes, yes!

Did everybody notice how much better the Popular Science website looks in Firebird than IE?

The source for Popular Science shows their css article text size as 10px. That's way too small on my monitor (1280x1024).

Somebody fire that guy.

Re:Font Magnification

[rseuhs]

Now if only there were a way to specify (when needed) that I want the background to be white and the text black.

look here

Click on "zap colors"

Re:Font Magnification

[BrokenHalo]

Point taken, but why does every discussion on Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird always get 40% of its postings from Opera zealots?

I have no particular beef against Opera except from brief contact with the "free" version a few years ago when, for all its speed etc, the adspace seemed to take up more room on the screen than the webpage content.

But is it so hard to stick to the topic?

Re:Font Magnification

[BrokenHalo]

Just in case you don't know, if you have a scroll-mouse you can use it to interactively increase/decrease font-size in Mozilla by holding a user-selected modifier-key while rolling the wheel. I presume the function is there in Firebird as well...

Re:Whatever.

[dbglt]

Mozilla doesn't _seem_ to be doing it on purpose, but the Phoenix stunt they pulled was little more than a shameless publicity stunt. Hardly see where they get code name from...

Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[kevin_conaway]

The article mentions that this is a faster, less bloated version of Mozilla. What are they trying to do here, what are hte main differences between Mozilla and Firebird and why do they seem to be advocating one of their products over another? kc

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[Lost Canadian Abroad]

... 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....

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

People only confuse a web browser and a database if they're thick or being intentionally obtuse in order to try and appear clever. I'm not sure yet which one applies to you, but it could quite possibly be both.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Huh, which one is which? Care to explain?

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[realdpk]

What the hell are you talking about? It's a valid question. What's the difference between the Mozilla I'm using now and this Firebird download - you know, the one that is the entire subject of the thread?

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is the entire package. A browser, email client, and a couple of other things, all in one. Firebird is just a browser. There is, or is going to be, a seperate email client.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firebird is not 'just' the Mozilla browser, they actually use the source-base of the Mozilla browser and rewrite parts of it to be more optimized and smaller. So basically Firebird contains code of the Mozilla browser and it's own more optimized code.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[quasi_steller]

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

I don't think anybody has.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[elmegil]

Mozilla is a mail client, a news client, an LDAP client, and a huge MF'ing bloated browser. I.E. it's the Emacs of Browsers.

Phoenix (now Firebird, still not sure I like that myself) is stripped down lean mean browser city, plus it allows you to install "extensions" that modify how it works. You can "put back" things you like about mozilla that were taken out in a couple of cases, plus there are lots of other nifty things. Download a copy, go to "find extensions" under the preferences panel for extensions and look at all the goodies.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[BrokenHalo]

it's the Emacs of Browsers.

But... but... emacs is a browser :-)

man emacs if you don't believe me. I've found it quite handy from time to time when I've had to ssh to a host from a dumb terminal after a failed X11 session. While I mostly use Gnome nowadays, it is perfectly possible to use emacs as a complete desktop environment.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[elmegil]

And I think Mozilla aspires to the same.

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[BrokenHalo]

And I think Mozilla aspires to the same

Maybe it does, but I, for one, would find it moderately hard to run Mozilla without an X11 session. Maybe an extension to represent the page as ASCII-art? :-)

Re:Difference between Firebird and Mozilla?

[elmegil]

So I should have said it aspires to be xemacs then? Give me a break. You understand the point I'm making, I never said it was a one-to-one mapping.

In other news...

[The-Bus]

Pontiac releases the new Pontiac Phoenix GT.

Web panels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody know what the Web Panels thingy does? (View->Sidebar->Web Panels) I can't really get it to do _anything_ at all :)

Re:Web panels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Panels was backed out from 0.6 but they must have forgot to remove that. At least the Web Panels bookmarks are gone and don't keep coming back!

Re:Web panels?

[willll]

Web Panels is/was a half implemented feature thats function was to allow customizeable sidebars in Firebird, similar to Mozilla's sidebar. It was never fully implemented and was supposed to be removed from 0.6, but obviously it wasn't fully removed.

Re:Web panels?

[BrokenHalo]

I had wondered about that. Since the first thing I turn off is the sidebar (I hate it with a passion), I guess it would never have occurred to me to customise it.

Silly me. :-)

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

But is it faster than Opera? ;P

Oh Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we have another gazillion years to wait for a 1.0 release.

Re:Oh Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the waiting that's fun. A reason to great each new day, etc.

A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Ed Avis]

The Mozilla Firebird developers seem to be the first mainstream developers to finally realize that a browser doesn't have to follow every stupid thing that a 'web designer' dictates. A browser does not have to pop up moronic Javascript windows just because the site says so. It doesn't have to allow the site to obscure the status bar just because the site wants to. If the Javascript specification allows these things, well then the spec is broken and it's right for the browser to ignore it and do (by default) what the _user_ is most likely to want. Font resizing that always works is another instance of this.

(One more thing I wish they would fix, however, and that is links that open in a new window. It shouldn't be up to the web site to control opening new windows in the user's browser, it's confusing to the novice (as Nielsen points out) and annoying to many experienced users. The default browser settings, IMHO, ought to open all links in the same window and let the user choose whether to do something different by middle-clicking instead of left-clicking. I hope the Firebird people can fix this one remaining annoyance in a future release.)

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[zdzichu]

(One more thing I wish they would fix, however, and that is links that open in a new window.[...])

You can fix it by yourself:

// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_wind ow", true);


Check this page for more interesting tweaks.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Ed Avis]

Thanks for the tip! I still think it should be the default setting though; 'not-annoying by default' is the best principle. (Although perhaps most web users do not share my feeling that opening in a new window is annoying.)

But the site you mention seems to be down: texturize.net redirects to www.texturize.net and there is no such host. Or something like that.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[MindStalker]

I'm pretty sure the specs declare most of these features as optional features not absolutly nessesary for a browser. The specs in making these optional more had PDAs and such in mind, but there is no reason a desktop can't be as simple as a PDA.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Anonymous Coward]

the site you mention seems to be down

That second link should be this.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Zigg]

The first link the guy posted -- to texturizer.net -- is correct.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we finally managed to get some semblance of order among the browsers without having to code four sites for each domain, and of course, the developers can't have that, so we'll just go out and break everything again on purpose.

lol and everyone wonders why so many sites use Flash... (hint: IT DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT what browser you have)

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[0x0d0a]

If the Javascript specification allows these things, well then the spec is broken and it's right for the browser to ignore it and do (by default) what the _user_ is most likely to want.

No, the spec allows the browser to do these or not. Hence, the spec is not broken. :-)

Try popping up a new window in, say, elinks. :-)

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[stesch]

// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_window", true);

Last time I checked this it not only blocks target="_blank", it blocks every target. Some wanted popups use this technique and this makes it impossible to use them.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[GreyWolf3000]

In my opinion, a tabbed-browsing enabled browswer should just open those in a new tab.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[vistic]

I pretty much always middle-click to open links in a new tab in the background. That's where it will load if you set it that way, even if it has a target="" tag to make it pop into a new window.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[joshwa]

With Tabbrowser Extensions, you can do just that.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Salamander]

One more thing I wish they would fix, however, and that is links that open in a new window.

I got tired of this too, a long time ago. As a result, I have both Proxomitron (Windows) and Privoxy (Linux) filters to fix it. Conversely, one site that I use insists on opening new pages in the current window even if you try shift-click/control-click/whatever to open them in a new one. My Proxomitron/Privoxy filters fix that too. :-) Don't leave $HOME without one or the other.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Elektroschock]

I hope the alternative themes will get more stable. Some just don't work.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[insin]

FYI: In 0.6, you can enter "about:config" in the address bar to get access to all Firebird's settings without having to mess about with or create user.js in your profile directory.

Some recommended tweaks:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay - set this to "0" to speed up page rendering.
browser.tabs.autoHide - set this to false to prevent the tab-bar hiding itself when there is only one tab.
browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace - set this to false to force new tabs to be created (not replacing any open tabs) when you middle click on a bookmark folder to open all it's contents.

Plus, you can see which preferences you have changed from their default values by ordering config values by "Status" and checking the "user set" section (NB. non-default values are rendered in bold text as well).

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[babbage]

Interesting. What if you don't want to avoid all popups though, but would rather force them into new tabs instead -- is this possible? Some of us have to use web apps that are annoyingly popup happy, and simply disabling popups is unfortunately overkill...

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

I believe that you can force popups to go to new tabs, but I don't recall how to do it. You might have to get the extended tabs thinger for Mozilla.

The other option is to turn on pop-up blocking, and override the blocking just for the web apps that you need it for. If you have a recent version, go to the popup section of your preferences, and fiddle with it.

-If

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[Ed Avis]

Yes, middle-click always opens the link in a new tab, no matter what HTML code the site has to say otherwise. This is good. But the same consistency should be extended to left-click, so that it always opens links in the same tab.

Re:A browser that puts the user's interests first

[thing12]

Try popping up a new window in, say, elinks. :-)

But wouldn't it be cool, if you were using screen or even an xterm to have new windows open up a new screen window or a new xterm running your text-mode browser? Not that I want unnecessary pop-ups, but sometimes browsing in a new window is handy. Really it could be implemented by adding an 'Open link in external program ' option then you could just have it run 'screen elinks {url}' and it would open in a new screen window.

How about XUL?

[axxackall]

Will Mozilla browser UI be based on XUL? If not - does it mean that XUL is dead?

Re:How about XUL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you follow the links in the article and find out?

Re:How about XUL?

[DarkOx]

They are using XUL.

Re:How about XUL?

[DrXym]

The Mozilla browser is based on XUL. So is Firebird.

Re:How about XUL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you follow the example your mother set for you and go choke on a cock?

Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Isomer]

Why should I use pheonix over other (non IE) browsers? The "why" page lists a whole heap of reasons which don't really make me feel like I should be leaving mozilla, other people are saying why should they leave opera, the page feels a lot more geared towards IE users. Surely some one here uses Pheonix enough to give good comparisons between Mozilla/Opera and why we should switch.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest difference is that Pheonix/Firebird is only the browser. No composer, no email client.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Azureflare]

I think the only solution is for you to try it out. No one else is going to tell you "OHH this is what you really like, and Phoenix does it better for you!!!" You're the only one who knows what you like about your web browsers. Download it, give it a whirl. Personally, I download all major browsers available for linux, and then choose the one that appeals to my tastes. Remember, this is only version 0.6; it's a very young project, so there will probably be a lot of adjustments in the future.

BTW I tried opera, and I really liked it, but under linux for some reason it's incredibly slow, compared to Konqueror and Mozilla (Loading time of the application and viewing of webpages). I used version 6 for a while, then tried 7; I still find myself going back to galeon and/or konqueror. Firebird is fast, the UI is great.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[DrXym]

Firebird has less chrome / overlays than the entire Mozilla, less XPCOM components and .xpt files and a simpler UI. This makes it start up a bit quicker, and run a bit better. That means that if you're just browsing, or intend to use a third party mail application it would be better than Mozilla.

Personally I just take the hit on startup for Mozilla since I have it running all day so a few seconds startup makes no odds. I also reckon that aside from a few annoyances the mail/news component is second to none (and miles better than Outlook Express) and needless to say I use that all the time too. So in my case, it makes sense to use Mozilla.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[oogoliegoogolie]

Most, if not all, of the reasons listed on that page are features already present in Mozilla. The one thing I hear over and over is that Phoenix/firebird loads faster than mozilla and displays pages faster than mozilla, yet I have seen very little difference in speed on a 2Gig or 0.7 Gig machine. And unless you're still using a 850 MB HD, application size issues are irrelevent.

The only one unique advantage on the page is Mozilla Firebird offers 2% more space to web pages than Mozilla, 4% more than Internet Explorer, and a whopping 10% more than Opera, which doesn't seem like much reason to switch over. Change the fonts and any savings can be wiped out.

Now what I have seen of firebird I like, but I still don't see any advantage to switching over, not that switching over would be a monumental task, but I am happy with Mozilla. (please, no 'well it's about choice' replies. We all understand that.)

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[the_2nd_coming]

either way you will be using firebird in about a year because mozy will be firebird..

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[jilles]

Firebird is derived from the same code base as mozilla so obviously it has a lot in common with its parent. However, it's the little things that matter and a lot of little things are different in firebird. I never liked the mozilla gui it feels bloated, buttons are in the wrong place, labeled improperly, etc (and the default theme is extremely ugly). Firebird has a much better UI and ships with a really elegant theme. A small illustration of this 'better' design is the behavior of the middle button. Unlike mozilla, middle clicking (to open a link in a new tab) also works on bookmarks, bookmark sidebar, history sidebar and toolbar links. In mozilla it only works on links in a page. This is just one example of better UI design.

This, and the fact that firebird is more tweakable than mozilla, is the reason I use firebird. I wasn't expecting much of it the first time I installed it (0.4 nightly). It looked really simplistic but I soon discovered that under the hood it was still mozilla. This morning I installed 0.6. After installation I rearranged the toolbar (cool drag & drop UI), installed some of my favorite extensions (googlebar, tab extensions, popup alt), tweaked some undocumented stuff (e.g. nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0) and edited only one or two settings in the preferences UI (most of the defaults make sense). The resulting browser has most of the features I want in a browser, looks nice and elegant and performs nicely. Comparing it to mozilla browser is really unfair because the firebird developers kept all the good stuff and threw away most of the bad stuff in mozilla.

The speed difference is real BTW, even on fast machines. With firebird I just close the browser if I'm done surfing and open it when I need it again later on. With mozilla that takes me too much time. Especially if all relevant files are in the cache, firebird launches almost instantly (like IE). I have a lot of memory and hence a lot of cache so most of the time, firebird launches really fast (1 to 2 seconds typically).

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Idolatre]

what will happen to the mozilla mail client?

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I'm not sure why people consider Mozilla "bloated" I consider it "option packed" If firebird's flexibility is what makes it less bloated, why not just add some UI tweaks to Mozilla. The mail/news suite is great and having this integrated is much faster than waiting for outlook or some other inferior mail software to load (so much for firebird's load-time advantage).
IMHO mozilla turned out to be a really great browser suite that was just never able to loosen IE's stronghold, and they are finally giving up on competing and are trying to find a new niche.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[the_2nd_coming]

thunderbird (a stand alone mail client that plays nice with firebird and is based on mozy mail) will be used.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[Isomer]

I believe the reason that Phoenix renders faster is due to a little known option which delays rendering of the page for a certain time so that more of the page can be d/l'd before it starts rendering it. This apparently gives a better impression of latency in Phenoix (where the delay is lower), but a much better feel to mozilla (where the delay is higher) because text isn't jumping around so much.

I hear a lot of people talk about startup, and while I agree that mozilla's startup time is very slow, I tend to keep my mozilla instance around for multiple days so I don't tend to care too much. If it was faster I might be more inclined to close it I guess

Mozilla's mail I find as being the nicest IMAP email client I've found, so I tend to use it (although my main email client at home is mutt). So removing the mail functionality seems to be a step backwards to me.

Are there any features in Pheonix that aren't in Mozilla?

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[MyHair]

I first tried Firebird (then Phoenix) at work because I wanted Mozilla's browsing features but used my corporate standard mail client.

If you install the Mozilla binary distributions you can't make the mailto: links open a third-party mail client; conversely you can't make the http:// links in Mozilla Mail open third party browsers, so I started using Firebird at home because I'm going to switch to Thunderbird mail soon because I'm pissed off at Mozilla's password manager. I want it to remember my mail passwords but never remember anything on the web, and it ain't doing it for me.

Re:Why do /.'ers think people should switch?

[mojo333]

Firebird eats ~50% less RAM than Mozilla. For people (like me) living in countries where RAM isn't cheap, it's a huge reason to stick with Firebird.

Installer freezes Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone else noticed that installing FB causes Win 9x explorer to hang/crash?

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[dbglt]

Home users still use Windows 9x? Get off the drugs and get a pirated copy of something better, or upgrade to a *nix system :P

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality.
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/April/os.php

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[SoSueMe]

Just installed with no problems, no reboot, no sweat.

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[ack154]

I use XP, so I don't have to worry about zip files since XP handles them just fine, but I usually use WinRAR when I have something else to compress/decompress. Works fine for me.

As for the "install", what are you trying to do? There really is no "installation" of Firebird. I've been using nightlies since like October and nothing has changed in the "install." You just unzip the folder to the directory that you want it in (C:\Program Files will usually do fine). And run the program. It creates anything it needs from there (Profiles folder, etc).

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[modicr]

There is an error in chart.
You should replace Windows XP and Windows ME !!!

Look at http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/os.php

W98=40%, W2K=30%, WXP=19%, WNT=2%, W95=2%

Total:
W9X=42%, WNT=51%, XYZ=7%

But, can we trust this stats???
Are there any other useful stats pages?

Roman

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[GrimReality]

Has anyone else noticed that installing FB causes Win 9x explorer to hang/crash?

I have never installed the Mozilla Suite or Phoenix with the installer. I always went for the PKZipped archive (.zip).

Why?

• Mozilla and Phoenix Zip files are well orgaised an all you need to do is to unzip (extract) it to an empty directory. Delete or move the Phoenix or Mozilla profile (depending on the bookmarks and stuff) You might have to do this even when using an installer.
• It is easier to recover a corrupted Zip archive than an installer.
• Chances of getting a corrupt installer is greater than that of a zip archive. Again, once the intaller is even slightly corrupted the whole archive is gone; in the case of a zip archive the arhiving utility usually has some feature to get data out of slightly corrupt archives.

So, my advice is to try to get the zip file if one is available. It is very straightforward. Of course, it not applicable to every program, for instance for some windows programs it would not be a simple act of just extracting stuff into a directory, so this advice is just about Mozilla and Firebird.

Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-05-17 15:13:25 UTC (2003-05-17 11:13:25 EDT)

Re:Installer freezes Windows?

[shione]

W98 has the best compability when it comes to gaming and there are some old games still worth playing.

Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[mercan01]

Just out of a vague and morbid sense of curiosity, I thought Camino was supposed to be the firebird of OSX? Not that I mind the choice, but it just seems odd that they'd release two browsers that seem to occupy the same niche.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're different teams, different people... different projects with different origins.

Yes, they do use the same code base though.

Browsers seem to be the new text editor; where once, when a coder was stepping up from 'hello world' they would move to making and releasing a text editor out of some time honoured tradition (or as a substitute for anything better to do quite yet) now it seems we have browsers.

It's not all bad

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[ZenPirate]

Camino still "feels" a bit faster.Especially load time.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

firebird doesnt use aqua, camino does, big difference, but thats why firebird is so much faster.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[Arker]

Umm I think you got that backwards.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[squiggleslash]

...Camino also seems better integrated than Mozilla F. The latter redefines Cmd-H to mean "hide/show sidebar" (every other application has it as the "hide this app" which, on Mac OS X's single-workspace desktop, is an absolute god-send, and ignores the middle mouse button for those who have middle mouse buttons (no more easily opening links in new tabs.)

It's also smaller. Mozilla F for OS X actually decompressed to a 30 meg directory. Camino is closer to 20 - despite being, IMNSHO, more functional.

I think The Browser Formerly Known As Phoenix shows promise on OS X, but right now it's a crude third well below Safari and Chimera/Camino, only just above IE, and a little bit above the butt-ugly-on-OSX Mozilla. That's a shame, because Phoenix is/was, IMO, my browser of choice on Linux and Windows.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

One vote for Camino.

As someone mentioned, the Camino is smaller.
The UI is, I think, cleaner.
And.. it's faster in being launched.

Quality skins for Firebird? I don't think so.
But.. Firebird can be good code base for Camino.

Re:Firbird or Camino? Make up my mind!

[rent]

Write Camino backwards, and you get: onimac

Now repeat "Onimac" really fast 5 times..

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

now Mozilla isn't even a browser anymore but also a relational database :-)

Building from source

[huhmz]

I just built Mozilla Firebird from source, actually i downloaded the source yesterday, but didn't want to start the build that late in the night because well... it takes a while to build ;)

The reason I wanted to build from source is that I wanted nifty anti aliased fonts which the nightly builds doesn't offer.
So...
wget http://64.12.168.21/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/moz illa-source.tar.bz2
tar -xjf mozilla-source.tar.bz2
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot checkout mozilla/browser mozilla/toolkit

Now we are ready to choose build options.
cd mozilla
vi .mozconfig
here is what my .mozconfig contains

export MOZ_PHOENIX=1
mk_add_options MOZ_PHOENIX=1
ac_add_options --with-pthreads
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --disable-jsd
ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility
ac_add_options --disable-composer
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -march=pentium3 -mfpmath=sse,387"
ac_add_options --enable-strip

All the --disable- options are beause I only want Firebird and not the composer, mail, news etc
the --enable-xft is the important one if you want nice anti aliased fonts.
My --enable-optimize is just some optimizations for my p4 (-march=pentium4 was buggy last time I tried). If you have an or lower than pentium3 then choose diffrent options (man gcc) or use the more standard "-O2"
The MOZ_PHOENIX=1 is what tells the build process to build Phoenix (well Firebird its called now but the option is still MOZ_PHOENIX) and not the standard mozilla browser.
To start building:
make -f client.mk build
This will take a really long time. Also the configure process might complain that you are missing some library like Xft or libIDL, in that case you will have to install it (apt-get install libidl0 libidl-dev)
After the build is complete all the necessary stuff is in dist/bin/ so I copy that to /opt/firebird:
cp -r -L dist/bin/ /opt/firebird
(the -L option because the dir contains a lot of symlinks that will break if you don't use -L)
Now you can run firebird with /opt/firebird/MozillaFirebird

I don't know if this is exactly the official way to do it but that's how I did it.
Good luck

Re:Building from source

[dcstimm]

ENABLE GTK2 and you will have some amazing looking fonts!

Re:Building from source

[Anonymous Coward]

> ENABLE GTK2 and you will have some amazing looking fonts!
It's enough to just enable Xft (as in the parent) to get those wonderful fonts...

Re:Building from source

[pafrusurewa]

The reason I wanted to build from source is that I wanted nifty anti aliased fonts

If that's all you want, why compile it when there are people who do it for you. The Slackware packages are very much like the official tarballs.

Re:Building from source

[Anonymous Coward]

I found instructions on how to build tarballs like you can download from the nightly directory on ftp.mozilla.org.

cd mozilla/xpinstall/packager
make MOZ_PKG_FORMAT="BZ2" PKG_BASENAME="MozillaFirebird-i686-pc-linux.`date +%Y%m%d`" MOZILLA_BIN="\$(DIST)/bin/MozillaFirebird-bin"

The bz2 file is in mozilla/dist/

Re:Building from source

[Raagshinnah]

is it just me or is the cvs server down? or EXTREMELY laggy? its been sitting at the passwd prompt for over 15 mins -_- i tried to also do a direct checkout (as you wrote in your post) but that one just sits there and waits too...hrm...

Re:Building from source

[caluml]

I just compiled it. Phew. It is a bit of a monster.

real 212m39.374s
user 170m23.660s
sys 12m51.380s

Re:Building from source

[CvD]

This sucks... I don't want to compile the damn thing myself if I want to use Xft antialiased fonts. Are there any builds that have this enabled by default available for download?

I think I'll just wait until it is available as a Debian package, complete with Xft. The Debian unstable mozilla package does everything I want it to, including xft fonts.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Mozilla Firebird Help

[djst]

For more information about Mozilla Firebird and how to customize it, change themes and install extensions, visit Mozilla Firebird Help

Among other things, you'll find instructions on how to disable two of the new features: smooth scrolling and automatic image resizing.

Tab behavior

[tmark]

I've been using Mozilla and Netscape, and I couldn't stand how opening a link in a new tab also switched focus to that tab. I don't know about previous FireBird versions, but this one opens a new tab but keeps focus on the current window, which is how I think it *should* work.

Re:Tab behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

Konqueror and Opera have had this fuctionallity for ages, right click the link, and click "open up in background tab"

Re:Tab behavior

[Gandalfar]

Edit -> Preferences -> Tabbed Browsing -> Load links in the background

should do the trick :)

Re:Tab behavior

[Ryne]

What I don't like is that when you open a new tab by clicking on a link and then closes that tab, it doesn't remember which tab you viewed last. Instead it closes the tab and shows the one furthest to the right in the tablist. I think Opera remembers the order you have watched the tabs if I'm not mistaken.

Re:Tab behavior

[Tyreth]

You and the rest of the world.

That aggravated me, but I think there was an option. Doesn't really matter though since I use Galeon fo now.

Re:Tab behavior

[Tyreth]

Konqueror has not had tabs at all for ages. It is only a recent (3.1) addition.

Mozilla has had it as an option for quite a while, just turned off by default.

Galeon, using the mozilla browser, has had it on by default for a long time.

On a slightly related note, I've heard they've fixed up the problem with slow tabs in Konqueror in CVS - I'm looking forward to that.

Re:Tab behavior

[Jugalator]

This was an option at least in Phoenix 0.5 which is several months old by now. Are you sure you just didn't notice the option? It was set to "switch to new tab" by default I think. Not that it matters now when you've got it the way you want. :-) But I still think they might just've changed the default.

What's annoying me is that the middle-click on empty area and move the mouse up/down to scroll in the page doesn't work. :-( Sure, scroll up with the *weel* does, but that's tedious IMHO.

I know there's a Mozilla plugin for this functionality but I don't know if that's compatible with 0.6 and I also recall it being a bit buggy. Grr.. You'd think that after this time, they'd at least implemented full scroll wheel support.

Re:Tab behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey numbnuts, opening new tabs in the background has always been an option in Mozilla. RTFM.

Edit > Preferences... > Navigator > Tabbed browsing > Tab Display / Load Links in the Background

Re:Tab behavior

[Dylan Zimmerman]

I'm using the March 4th build of Phoenix 0.5. The extension that adds auto-scroll (wherfe you click down the wheel and move the mouse around to scroll) works almost flawlessly. It choked once on a huge (a few hundred pages long) page, though.

I really like this build. It's stable, fast, and I simply don't see a reason to upgrade yet.

Re:Tab behavior

[Jugalator]

Ok, I might give it another shot then. It was a while since I tried it out and hopefully the annoyances with it has been fixed by now.

Re:Tab behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

The reasons I keep using Galeon rather than Phoenix/firebird (which loads much faster):

TABS!

Yes, I know Phoenix supports tabs, but the support isn't as good as galeon. I want close buttons on each tab, and the killer feature... the ability to reorganise the tabs by dragging them around. Even between Galeon windows. Give me these and I'm your's, firebird.

Re:Tab behavior

[Christopher Whitt]

I couldn't stand how opening a link in a new tab also switched focus to that tab

Edit-> Preferences-> Navigator-> Tabbed Browsing-> Tab Display-> Load links in the background

The pref has been in mozilla almost since tabs were implemented. Sorry you weren't able to find it. That's one of Mozilla Firebird's clear advantages: a vastly simplified and improved preference panel.

Re:Also...

[Ed Avis]

Quite right. It always seemed that the Netscape-branded browsers had a conflict of interest, since Netscape was trying to make money from some half-assed 'portal' at the time. If you want a decent web browser, you have to make sure that the people making it are reasonably well separated from advertisers and don't have any product of their own to sell. The same goes for most other network-connected software of course (imagine if the companies developing email clients were also the same people doing direct marketing; or look at RealPlayer).

Gotta Love Firebird/Phoenix

[Anonymous Coward]

Having just downloaded 0.6 after using 0.5 for four months, the following stands out to me:

• Much better default theme (I still use Orbit Blue personally, but the default is now bearable unlike the ugly theme they had before)
• Easy to copy settings from old version (save your bookmarks.html file in your settings and drop it in the same place in 0.6)
• The about:config page is very powerful; I don't think I even need the preferential extension any more but it was very useful in 0.5
• Go to Tools->Options->Privacy->Download Manager History - I thought they were fixing the comment here for 0.6, oh well
• Under settings Firebird creates a Phoenix and Mozilla directory (on Windoze at least). I guess that'll change eventually as well.

I haven't personally noticed the speed difference yet, but then again I'm on a dual 1700. It will be interesting to try on my old 166 and 200 boxes. Finally, congrats to the Phoenix/Firebird/Mozilla team on 0.6. It looks to be a very worthwhile upgrade and is definitely worth a try.

Re:Gotta Love Firebird/Phoenix

[BigHobson]

I also would like to congratulate the team involved with Phoenix/Firebird as a whole. I was using 0.5 for a while after moving over from Opera. I think that 0.5 and 0.6, the later i have just upgraded to, are far superior to the standard Mozilla. I really noticed a drop in speed when i tried Mozila while using Opera, but never noticed anything when using Phoenix. So far i have been impressed with Firebird, the about:config is nice, and i noticed a speed difference, which was for the better. Thanks again the Firebird team.

Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[hrbrmstr]

I haven't tried a ton of SSL connections yet, but so far it's given a 15-25% speed improvement (perhaps more) to browsing on my Mac (dual 867MHz G4).

I've tried:

• IE (hey, it came with it!)
  
• Safari (latest beta)
  
• Camino (latest stable release)
  
• Mozilla (the 'big daddy')
  
• Opera (lags behind on this platform)
  

IE just rots. Safari, in its most recent incarnation, works well standards-wise, but one can really feel how different it and the Mozilla code really are (and I do like Moz better). It's also "slow". Camino is coming along well, but it too is "slow". SSL is painful on both of them (I tend to use IE on a PC to hit SSL sites).

Firebird is just plain cool. A bit rough around the Mac edges, but it's *fast*. Did I mention that it's fast?

The Camino team and these guys should team up. The combined browser would be unmatched.

Re:Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[SlamMan]

Not sure I follow you on tthe whole slow/SSL thing. I don't find either Camino or Safari slow at all, and haven't run accorss any problems with SSL (self signed or auth-ed) on either. I haven't gotten Firebird yet though.

Re:Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[idontsmoke]

The latest (stable) camino uses the Mozilla 1.0 branch. Since 1.0 the Mozilla trunk has had many many speed improvements and now runs much faster. Try a nightly build of Camino, which also sports a new bookmark manager, a google search field and selective pop-up unblocking built into the UI.

Re:Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[Jordy]

Firebird (at least I downloaded a couple days ago since it has been available for OSX for over a week) is terribly slow on MacOS X when scrolling a page or hitting page down. It drives me absolutely crazy.

Re:Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[commodoresloat]

Safari, in its most recent incarnation, works well standards-wise, but one can really feel how different it and the Mozilla code really are (and I do like Moz better). It's also "slow". Camino is coming along well, but it too is "slow".

Usually when people put words in inverted commas it means the words are being used in a different way than is usual. So, by "slow," I assume you mean "fast."

Re:Mac OS X version is pretty zippy

[hrbrmstr]

It's a completely different experience on this end.

My config (far from state of the art):

2 x 867MHz G4
133MHz bus
256K L2 cache per processor
1MB L3 cache per processor

1.5GB RAM DDR SDRAM (2100)

NVIDIA GeForce4MX (standard one with the Mac)

OS X 10.2.6

I just re-tried a bunch of SSL sites and the the sites I usually hit. I did a side-by-side comparison between it and Safari and Firebird beat it every time.

They may just be managing user perception well (i.e. making it seem like it's faster).

If someone can point me to a benchmarking tool that can measure browser stuff, I'll be glad to run tests on all of the available Mac browsers and post them somewhere (since we're sliding down the slippery slope of being off topic a bit). I'll google for it as well.

MacOS X comments from release notes

[tbmaddux]

Under "What's New" it says "Mozilla Firebird is available for Mac OS X. It's still quite rough around the edges but it's a start." Under "Known Issues" it says "Firebird on Mac OS X is new and still very rough around the edges. Expect platform inconsistencies."

Also, several annoying features (such as auto image resizing) require user.js hacks, which is a minor hassle. I already have Mozilla 1.3.1, Safari (v.74), and Camino 0.7. I switched to Camino from Mozilla, and Safari is starting to catch up. I might download Mozilla Firebird to check it out, but I doubt I'll get much use out of it right now. And each of these browsers has its own settings and bookmarks. It would be nice to have some sort of somewhat automated sync-ability of bookmarks between these different browsers for MacOS X, especially the 3 (!) Mozilla-based ones.

Re:MacOS X comments from release notes

[rmohr02]

It's not automatic, but you can export your bookmarks from one browser into a .html file, and then import them from another browser. And importing in the second won't break your current bookmarks--it will just add to them. Also, you could set each browser to use the same folder for profiles.

Re:MacOS X comments from release notes

[mattrix2k]

Go into about:config (type it into the URL bar and press enter) on one of the Moz browsers. Right click inside the window and go New -> String call it browser.bookmarks.file and set it's value to the path of the bookmarks.html file from the other Moz browser you want to share bookmarks to. That's a bit of a bad explaination, sorry.

Re:MacOS X comments from release notes

[Christopher Whitt]

several annoying features ... require user.js hacks, which is a minor hassle.

You do know about about:config, don't you? It's neat - try it! Saves drilling down your directory tree to find *.js in your profile directory, too.

Bookmarks is one of my sore spots with Moz too. I notice there are many bookmark related projects on mozdev but I haven't tried any yet.

Re:MacOS X comments from release notes

[davebo]

only problem with this idea is that camino saves its bookmarks as an .xml file, not as standard "netscape1-bookmark-file" .html. Although, of course, you can export from Camino .xml to that .html.

It's possible that within a few weeks Camino will move to a .plist file, which is what Safari uses. Or that it's choice of bookmark file becomes much more customizable. But we'll have to see if the big guys will go along with that ;)

Re:MacOS X comments from release notes

[BrokenHalo]

Many thanks for that, I had never noticed that feature, and I've been using Mozilla for years - just goes to show... :-)

Two Things I Would Like to See

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Where are the Xft builds? Reading the Firebird forums, one notes that not everyone has Xft, therefore, Firebird is not built with Xft. One is told to build from source if one wants Xft enabled builds. Oh ok, Firebird can not do what Opera handles by default, in a smaller download no less. No prob, back to Opera I go.
2. The best feature I ever saw in any browser, was in the older Galeon builds. In the preferences, there was a checkbox, which allowed you to select a preferred download manager, such as Prozilla. When will Firebird have this?

I really, really, really would like to use Firebird. #1 above is a must.

Re:Two Things I Would Like to See

[the_2nd_coming]

heh...yeah that parent of that responce was me...I was kinda pissed off. but there is a web page of a dude who builds unoficial versions with xft in them.

http://phoenix.ragweed.net/download

unfortunatly right now he only has .5 not .6 builds.

Re:Two Things I Would Like to See

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus does it kill people to use google before they make a list of demands? Xft builds for various systems here

Heres what the cow thinks.....

[Anonymous Coward]

____________________
< rm -R /opt/mozilla >
--------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----M |
|| ||

MooKore! At the herd of the Game!

Re:Heres what the cow thinks.....

[leviramsey]

Gotta love cowsay!

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

"phoenix from the flames" perhaps......

the name firebird seems to follow this theme too

do a google search if you're unfamiliar! ;-)

The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[Gruturo]

6.66

Man. that's evil! :-)

Re:The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[Anime_Fan]

Actually, that's the size of the zip... The actual binary (main binary, MozillaFirebird.exe is 7.29 MBs in size)...

From: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/releases/0.6/M ozillaFirebird-0.6-win32.zip
To: E:\Programs\Internet\mozilla\MozillaFirebird-0.6-w in32.zip
Size: 6.7 MB (6986348 bytes)
Transferred: 6.7 MB (6986348 bytes)

(File information taken from Opera, my browser of choice)...

Re:The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[graveyhead]

Actually isn't that:

number-of-the-beast
--------------------
100

Which is the number of the micro-beast, IIRC.

Seriously, though, some people take that number *way* too seriously. When I worked in retail in my youth, I came across more than one customer who would actually purchase something else to change their total. I always wanted to say to them:

"It's not the total of your video and candy that's going to send you to hell, I promise."

But I never really had the balls to say it ;)

Re:The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[Robert Hopson]

Actually, that's the number of the centi-beast.

Re:The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[faspeed]

If you want more evil stuff, just type about:mozilla in Mozilla 1.4 Beta.

Re:The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[graveyhead]

Actually, that's the number of the centi-beast.

Ach. Damn metric demons get me every time :P

No down arrow searches?

[chefbimbo]

One thing's for sure, even if I could care less for the cruft Mozilla comes with, I'm not gonna use Firebird until they support hitting down arrow to search on Google.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[Tyreth]

One thing I'd like to be able to do, is type anything in the address bar. If it isn't in a proper url format (no periods, for example) then it searches google with that text and the "I'm feeling lucky" option.

That way I can just type slashdot, or any of a thousand other websites I might visit commonly, and it will go there automatically. Also good for when I'm looking for something new and feel confident of my googling skills :)

This result could also be achieved by setting shortcuts, but doesn't seem as flexible and powerful.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[mattrix2k]

Firebird 0.6 seems to do exactly that.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[FsG]

No problem, you can have this in absolutely any browser with Proxomitron. This personal proxy for Windows (runs just great in Wine, btw) lets you pull a wide variety of absolutely amazing tricks, making it an indespensible utility for enjoyable browsing.

To make it do what you're asking, install and run the program, and click on "Headers" and then on "New." For HTTP Header enter "URL: Auto FeelingLucky (out)" (without the quotes) and for URL Match enter the following:

[^./]+/(^?)&\w[a-z]&$JUMP(http://www.google.com/ search?btnI=1&q=\h)

..and leave the last 2 fields blank. Click OK and check "Out" for the filter you've created and click OK again.

And that's it. you can now type any word into the location bar and if it's not a URL, your I'm Feeling Lucky search will happen, as you requested. Oh, might wanna SAVE your settings in Prox now.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[An Onerous Coward]

I've got Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search set to the keyword "goto". So I type in "goto cowboyneal" and it takes me straight to cowboyneal.org. Goofy looking fella. BTW, I'm running Mozillaphoenixfirebirdbrowser 0.5.

I'm not sure, but "I feel lucky" also seems to be the default behavior when I don't type in a keyword.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[shione]

whats wrong with using the google box right next to the address box?

Default, it finds text on the page, but if you click on the magnifying glass you can change it to do a google search. I'm sure with a bit of customization you can change that to do a 'I'm feeling lucky' search

Re:No down arrow searches?

[chefbimbo]

It's a box nobody needs. It's a pain to hit Tab to get there or to use the mouse. I won't use it, that's for sure. Now the "g query" solution sounds sane, but for the time being, I'll stick to Mozilla.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[asa]

I'm not gonna use Firebird until they support hitting down arrow to search on Google.

And what's so crazy about using the search field and saving that extra down arrow keystroke? In addition to the default Google, the search field can have literally hundreds of search engines available with a single click (including google images, groups, and news). Why would you want to use the very limited search option of Mozilla's addressfield whe you can use a powertool like Mozilla Firebird's search field? It's faster, more flexible andd requires one less keystroke.

--Asa

Re:No down arrow searches?

[jeffphil]

I 100% agree on this.

I've been using Mozilla forever, and it is a hard habit to break typing directly into the URL field, then up-arrow and enter to auto-google search. Up-arrow bypasses history in the drop-down.

I could switch to keywords, because I use them for other things -- but it's going to take some serious finger retraining.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

You could also just set it so that it doesn't do a google unless you type "google xxxxxxx" in the address bar. That's what I do; Phoenix takes over from there, and extrapalates URLs flawlessly.

Cheers,

Re:No down arrow searches?

[jsoderba]

So what's the keyboard shortcut for the search field?

Re:No down arrow searches?

[blah_ect]

So what's the keyboard shortcut for the search field?

Ctrl + L (lower case) tab (type in whatever you want to search for) hit Enter.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[Trygve]

No, it's ctrl-k.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[perlyking]

On the opening of a new tab focus defaults to the url bar. Because of this its an extra keystroke, or piddling around with the mouse.
On the more general topic of this thread:
Myself I've got phoenix, firebird, and mozilla all with a variety of extensions and I am spoilt for choice.

I am feeling really positive about the mozilla project at the moment I have to say. I said goodbye to Opera a few months ago and am not missing it much.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[wossName]

It's the same number of keystrokes:

In Mozilla you open a new tab, enter your search term, press the up arrow (menu wraps around to the search engine) and press enter.

In Firebird you open a new tab, press the tabulator key, enter your search term and press enter.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[MrNemesis]

Argh, here I go with another "Actually, Opera..." post...

Opera has functionality similar to this (though IIRC it's not configurable)... to search google for "foo" you type "g foo" into the addy bar, and away you go. There's loads of them in there (delve into the preferences to see a complete listing).

But I have to say, Firebird/Phoenix has been gradually supplanting my beloved Opera for quite a while now... here's hoping!

Re:No down arrow searches?

[jmd!]

I'm not gonna use Firebird until they support hitting down arrow to search on Google.

And what's so crazy about using the search field and saving that extra down arrow keystroke?

Focusing a separate text field is more work than the old down arrow method, and wastes absolutely disgusting amounts of screen real estate

Browsers should have one text field, and no more. One is needed to display the current address. Input is it's secondary use. Adding another text field that only has use as an input device is silly.

I think this guy would have been happier if you pointed him to the document on setting up custom keywords ("g foo" searches google for "foo" for me), or on setting his keyword URL pref so searches are automatic.

The search bar may (may) be helpful to new users, but I think most power users find it annoying. But since new users are the ones unlikely to edit preferences or install extensions, I find it an acceptable default.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[blah_ect]

No, it's ctrl-k.

So it is, thanks for the correction

Re:No down arrow searches?

[asa]

The search bar may (may) be helpful to new users, but I think most power users find it annoying.

I think just the opposite. Newbies may be happy with a limited single search engine for all searches in the Mozilla urlbar but power users like me want the flexibility different searches in their search field. I have google, google groups, google news, google images, dmoz, bbc news, salon and NASA searches all available in my search field. I can't get that power-functionality in my Mozilla urlbar.

--Asa

Re:No down arrow searches?

[jmd!]

Sure you can. g, gg, gn, gi, dmoz, bbc, salon, nasa keywords. Easier to type a letter or two than deal with picking one from a menu. I have 16 keywords. Selecting a text box, typing, then selecting an entry from a 16-long list of destinations sounds like an abysmal idea to me.

Re:No down arrow searches?

[wurp]

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

Re:No down arrow searches?

[binford2k]

Actually, Mozilla can do this too. And for that matter so can Konqueror. They have for a long time.

Glendale!?

[tbmaddux]

At the top of the release notes it says "Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (Glendale)" and at the bottom it lists earlier names of Pescadero, Santa Cruz, Lucia, Oceano, and Naples.

Glendale is making progress towards a trashy cityname, but for true consistency with Camino I suggest the code name for the final release of Bakersfield, or perhaps Fresno.

Re:Glendale!?

[Dr. Spork]

How about "Lodi"?

Uh.. crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Under "Known Issues":

- Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes.
- Disabling of form auto-completion is not working.

Sweet.

Re:Uh.. crap

[zurab]

- Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes.
- Disabling of form auto-completion is not working.

I caught that too! This is ridiculous. They shouldn't release software in this state, doesn't matter if it's 0.6, pre, alpha, beta, or anything else. This reminds me of some MS software.

Re:Uh.. crap

[Unordained]

a few weeks ago, a friend of mine and i convinced my girlfriend to give then-phoenix a try ... she just about stopped using it, when auto-complete would kill the browser window (and any other phoenix windows she had open.) amazingly, the "stupid stuff doesn't pop up at random" feature was enough to keep her using it, and she just keeps typing, ignoring auto-complete ... she's been pretty happy with it.

(she and a friend have complained of a few sites that either don't render at all, or render -really- badly ... and at least one of them has some sort of auto-popup at the beginning of the page that is necessary for the rest of the page to load correctly ... and with popups turned off except for requested windows, that doesn't work. for the ones where this isn't the case, i'll probably have her submit a but report / check the html for stupid mistakes ... yes, she's a geek.)

Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

On the 0.5 series there was an option when you right-clicked a tab to "close other tabs" (leaving you with just that one).

I found it useful. I noticed it disappeared in the 0.6 nightlies and thought it would reappear in this official 0.6 release.

No such luck!

graspee

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Hakubi_Washu]

Opera 7 has this (Close all but active Ctrl+Alt+W). I have to admit though, that Opera sucks on small screens...

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, they got rid of that? I'm considering switching now... I can't count the number of times I accidentally clicked on "Close other tabs" instead of "Close tab" (they are next to each other) and lost a dozen open pages...

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, he asked how to do something in mozilla and you respond telling him how to do it in Opera. I just have to say, thanks for being useless!

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need the Tabbrowser Extensions extension. It re-adds this feature and a mulititude of others. If you're in Firebird now, click here to install it.

More extensions can be found over on Firebird Help.

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[mattrix2k]

If you want to close a tab just click on it with the middle mouse button.

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Hakubi_Washu]

My point was "If you _really_ miss a feature, then maybe you should start looking around for an alternative which offers it.". I could have said "You miss it? Go join the f**king team and implement it yourself.", instead of at least trying to be helpfull. Which _you_ weren't either, by the way...

Re:Where's the "close other tabs" ?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Thanks very much- you rock!

Of course I maybe could have got frustrated enough, done a search and found it myself- but you put the link there right in front of me!

Thanks. I am going to check out the other extensions now.

graspee

There is something to be said for Mozilla

[DrXym]

Obviously Firebird has it's uses but when you spend all day reading mail, news and browsing there is much to be said for an integrated all in one solution. It's the little things that you miss when you run seperate apps, for example middle-clicking on a link in a mail window and having a tab open in the browser, having a single password manager and so on. Mozilla is generally so rock solid, I'd be prepared to take a hit in stability for the better performance / footprint a single app brings.

Firebird obviously is useful if you want to use some other mail application but I think it is unwise to split the apps out without good reason, especially for the large number of people who love the integration of Mozilla.

I would much prefer this - design the apps so they can run seperately if desired, but also allow them to run in the same address space using chrome overlays. That is pretty much all Moz is doing right now, but it could be done much more cleanly so that you could mix and match the bits. This is quite feasible to do and it means the best of both worlds for everyone.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't find a link at the moment, but one of the aspects of their plan to replace the mozilla suite with firebird and the equivalent mail/news client is that they will make them able to run both separately and combined.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[djst]

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.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I imagine AOL would rather want a fully integrated product too, so we're bound to get the best of both worlds at some point!

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[jesser]

It's the little things that you miss when you run seperate apps, for example ... having a single password manager...

You're joking, right? I've had to help several users in #mozillazine who couldn't figure out how to delete their incorrect mail password in Mozilla (Seamonkey) MailNews because they didn't think to look through the dozens of passwords in Password Manager to find their stored mail password. I can't think of any way it's useful to be able to access passwords for the browser and mail client in the same window.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the second time I've used Phoenix/Firebird, and these are my impressions:

1. The Phoenix branch is much faster, with a much smaller memory footprint. It feels much much more responsive.

2. Firebird feels much less customizable to me than Mozilla, and I already miss many of the UI features in Mozilla. For example, I really like the sidebar--although I don't use it much, it is useful when I do. Firebird has a sidebar, but it's a joke compared to the sidebar in the original Mozilla. I don't like to have to go up to the menu bar to minimize and maximize a sidebar.

3. As many are starting to point out, the preferences seem much cleaner and more customizable in Mozilla. Others may disagree with me, but I feel as if I can exert more control over more things more easily in Mozilla than Firebird. This, of course, is something that can be fixed, but right now it feels sort of clunky.

Anyway, those are my impressions. I'm really glad to see Mozilla starting from a clean slate again, but feel that there's some things that need to be addressed at the same time. Overall, it seems that Firebird is really fast and snappy, but sort of kludgy and tinkery when it comes to preferences, UI, and customizability.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[scotch]

... for example middle-clicking on a link in a mail window and having a tab open in the browser....

You don't need a single application you just need reasonble communication between apps. For example, I can open a webpage in an existing mozilla/galeon windows (or new tab) from my email client mutt, which is text based, because of the terminal I use or with macros in mutt.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[MarcQuadra]

I really don't like when certain page or email brings down all of mozilla. I leave my eamil on one screen and browser window on two others. If I go to Intel.com and their page brings down all that is Mozilla and I lose the email I was composing to my boss, that pisses me off. I think email and browsing and chat should be seperate apps. I like the idea of 'tying' them toghether by building them out of the same stuff, but having them all live in one big binary is a recipe for disaster and makes 'spaghetti-code' development too easy.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[DrXym]

The thing is they don't all live in one big binary. Mozilla.exe is little more than a launch pad which starts up XPCOM, registers XPCOM components and loads all the chrome specified in the rdf. The only difference between Firebird / Mozilla is *what* chrome & XPCOM components are there to be loaded, but they run on top of the same framework.

The mail/news, composer, irc, js debugger, browser components in Mozilla may run in the same address space, but they are seperate on disk. Overlays are used to tie them all together. There isn't much spaghetti code at all, though there are places where the seperation between parts could be greater.

The intent of Mozilla Mail / Firebird will achieve that but it should still be possible if so desired to run the apps as a single executable. This is the difference between run the XPCOM components / jar files in two seperate processes or a single one, nothing more. So it should be possible to satisfy everyone.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[MarcQuadra]

I'm not sure I understand, if they were seperate components than why would opening a malformed web page make my email go bye-bye? If the browser can crash the whole XPCOM subsystem there is something wrong.

Re:There is something to be said for Mozilla

[DrXym]

It's hard to explain in laymens terms, but essentially mozilla.exe is just a launch pad for a bunch of XPCOM components and chrome. It doesn't care what those components or chrome are at all and in fact you can make mozilla.exe run something completely differnt from a browser just by pointing it at some other chrome.

So you could either run two mozilla.exe's, one with just the browser components / chrome and one with just the mail components / chrome, or you can run them in a single mozilla.exe where all the components are lumped together. This boils down to a configuration / packaging issue and either is possible right now. With careful design, the chrome and components in either case would be identical, but the config would determine how they were installed.

In my case, I prefer the tighter integration and therefore I'd take a hit on stability if need be, but someone who isn't could package the apps to run seperately. It should make no difference if the chrome is designed to run either way.

Now at a technical level, you would have to concern yourself with whether these two apps share a profile or have a seperate one, but profile sharing is in the code now so it's just a matter of fleshing out how these apps install and run and sticking to it.

Different widget sets

[Phantasmo]

Firebird is built with XUL, the Mozilla project's cross-platform widget set, while Camino is built with Cocoa, Apple's "application environment".

Camino is Mac OS X's answer to K-Meleon for Windows and Galeon for GNOME.

Native UI versus write once, compile anywhere.

Re:Different widget sets

[Idimmu Xul]

Firebird is built with XUL, the Mozilla project's cross-platform widget set, while Camino is built with Cocoa, Apple's "application environment".

The last i heard, the Gecko rendering engine used XUL to render the widgets (combo boxes, text entries, text areas, etc.) so even apps like K-Meleon, Galeon and Camino still use XUL.

Re:Different widget sets

[incom]

If XUL can be this fast cross platform, it should be used more often imho.

Re:Different widget sets

[atlasheavy]

Camino does use Cocoa. It may have the XUL stuff under the hood somewhere, but all of the controls are Mac OS X native. Which is a good thing. Firebird oh-six on Mac OS X has really freaky looking buttons under the preferences. I downloaded it, spent 20 seconds admiring the simplicity (and non-brushed metal ui), and then went back to Safari. Oh well. I'll try again in 6 months.

Re:Different widget sets

[DreadSpoon]

"Native UI versus write once, compile anywhere."

Sadly, that isn't true. You still have to write the whole backend. XUL uses GDK/GTK for example on UNIX. You _always_ need platform specific backends.

And then there's the problem of integration. I love the Mozilla Firebird UI a lot more than Galeon (which is just cracked out) or Epiphany (which has been way over-simplified to be useful), but Firebird doesn't in any way shape or form integrate nicely with my GNOME2 desktop. It looks and feels like a separate application. Things I've already configured in GNOME need to be reconfigured in Firebird. And so on.

Same goes for Mac OS X users, I'm sure - Firebird will not look or act like any other application. It'll act like a Windows app, mostly because that's what its design most closely mimics.

So please, developers - get rid of this silly "write once, sorta work everywhere, even tho we have to recode the backends" idea and realize that fully native UIs are so much better, especially for users. All that time Mozilla spent designing XUL could've been spent doing native UIs and had plenty of time left over. ;-)

actual link

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this page for results

That second link should be this.

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try here for example...

a better search would probably be "phoenix from the flames mythology" or "phoenix from the flames greek"

Cowboyneal wan'ts to eat us at McDonalds!

[Anonymous Coward]

_________________
/ But were are going \
\ to eat him first! /
-----------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||

What's up with this:

[C32]

From known issues on 0.6:
Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes.
Disabling of form auto-completion is not working.

So I can expect random crashes and annoying-ass autocomplete that can't be turned off? Cool. Think'll stay with IE..

Re:What's up with this:

[willll]

As long as you don't use autocomplete by clicking on one of the previously enter results, you will not get a crash. Also, the number of autocomplete crashes has significantly decreased since 0.5. Since the first fix for autocomplete crashing was checked in about a month ago, most Firebird users, including myself, have not experienced any crashes with autocomplete, but they have not disappeared completely, so it was neccessary to include the bug in the release notes.

"Don't Ask At Startup" Broken?

[SpaceRook]

I was pleased to start Firebird (on WinXP) and see that the profile selection now has a "Do Not Ask On Startup" option. However, it doesn't seem to work for me. (I still get asked to choose a profile even if I selected "Do Not Ask..." last time I opened it). Anyone else having this issue?

PS: I like the new "Back" and "Forward" buttons. I'll probably still download a new skin for them, but they are much better than the defaults for Phoenix (which always had my clicking on the mini-arrows that drop down a history list).

Re:"Don't Ask At Startup" Broken?

[djst]

Obviously, you haven't read the release notes.

Re:"Don't Ask At Startup" Broken?

[BlzOfGlry]

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.

Re:"Don't Ask At Startup" Broken?

[fredrikj]

I had this problem too, it seems that you can fix it by creating a new profile, then deleting the default profile so there's only one left.

Mod points won't slay US!

[Anonymous Coward]

____________________
< Slashdot will DIE! >
--------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||

About a zillion people wrote in...

[286]

hum.. I think I know why...

1. What can I do to help?

We need all the exposure we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!

I'll switch from mozilla

[SCHecklerX]

If it gets to 1.0, and if it does cookie-blocking properly (deny all by default, allow as needed).

Re:I'll switch from mozilla

[rmohr02]

Look at Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Enable Cookies -> But ask before accepting.

But if you stay with Mozilla, and keep upgrading, you'll be switched to Firebird/Phoenix/whatever anyway.

Re:I'll switch from mozilla

[the_2nd_coming]

heh...well you won't have to because mozilla 1.5 + will be firebird only.

I see that...

[zogger]

I see that it's only the browser part of mozilla. My question is, is it basically the same browser? Given that you would then need to turn on a separate email application anyway, is there really any savings then with cpu and ram? If it's a completely different browser, is it so significantly better and faster that one should switch? This is from the standpoint of using an older machine, just a 200. So far, using kitchen sink mozilla, I like it, speed is a variable, surfing seems OK, getting to the menu and like using preferences is very slow to change any settings, but besides that seems ok. Hard to tell sometimes, I find my bottle neck on surfing is more rural phone lines and the weather outside, ie, more rain and storms=crummier connections by a huge factor. I can't even use a 56k modem any time really, well, I have tried three of them, none of them stay online stable enough,get a lot of disconnects (under linux, on my classic mac, any modem I try works fine, and I don't know why the difference either) I get my best connection on dry days with a 33, and on really bad days I am forced to an old 14.4 just to get any connection at all.

Akk, drifted, what I was asking was, is the speed difference with phoenix really all that noticeable? Or is it just a very small amount, from anyone who has used both a lot for comparison?

thank you in advance

Re:I see that...

[grayrest]

New window performance is definitely noticeable. Startup can be faster, but otherwise they're about the same speedwise. I actually run Fb with mozilla mail because I have the RAM (256MB). So I wind up using more RAM than if I'd run mozilla, but I like the customizable toolbars and the extensions.

Re:I see that...

[zogger]

-thanks for the reply. I might try it, maybe. I think I am going to try moz 1.4b first though, because I've been using 1.3b and it's pretty good. Takes me freeking hours to download all the pieces though.....

Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[Jack Comics]

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.

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[sopuli]

I had the same problem. I think it was because I did not close Mozilla while installing Flash (yes, yes, I ignored the popup from the installer that told me to close all apps).

Anyway, unzipping Mozilla again fixed this, and all my settings and history was still there.

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[cioxx]

Here's the registry entry. Create a Firebird.reg file, copy the follwing entries there and double click it. It should make Firebird visible to scores of applications, not limited only to Flash.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla\Moz illa Firebird]
"GeckoVer"="1.0.1"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Mozilla\Mozilla Firebird\bin]
"PathToExe"="C:\\program files\\MozillaFirebird\\MozillaFirebird.exe"
[HKE Y_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla\Mozilla Firebird\Extensions]
"Plugins"="C:\\Program Files\\MozillaFirebird\\Plugins"
"Components"="C: \\Program Files\\MozillaFirebird\\Components"

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[Jack Comics]

Umm, err, that's what I was saying. Even *with* the Firebird.reg file with the entries as you listed, the same problem exists. The bug doesn't appear to have anything to do with the registry entries per se, more so some Mozilla Firebird code recently added, as I've changed the directory name, the file name, and the registry keys to reflect both, and it still has the same problem.

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[djst]

I have none of the suggested registry intries in my registry and Flash works perfectly fine here.

I installed it by following the instructions in my own FAQ. Not sure what I'm doing "wrong", because it works perfectly.

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[incom]

They should make an installer before 1.0

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[bogie]

I don't have to do any of that. Like always I just copy NPSWF32.dll to my plugins folder and off I go. Every Flash site I visit works fine. The very first time you install flash you may have to manually point out the plugins directory but thats it AFAIK.

I've been using Mozilla/Phoeinx/Firebird for well over a year and I've never had to do any registry editing.

I think you can also use this site as well to make Flash installation easier.

http://mazinger.technisys.com.ar/pruebas-nick/mo zi lla/

Re:Nasty Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[Stephen VanDahm]

"Please be aware that there is an extremely nasty Macromedia Flash-related bug in Mozilla Firebird 0.6."

The existence of Flash is an extremely nasty Macromedia Flash-related bug.

Steve

minimum font size

[Ender Ryan]

Yeah, Mozilla has had a minimum font size option for a long time too. I think it's the best thing since sliced bread, as I am so sick of having to stick my head closer to my monitor just to read some BS "fine print".

Annoyingly, this often throws off the layout of some websites, but that's pretty stupid design if a minor font-size adjustment throws it off... *cough gamespot cough* :)

Re:minimum font size

[steveha]

I don't use the "minimum font size" thing. Instead, I have a custom CSS file which sets the size of fonts.

Here is the secret formula. Put this in your userContent.css file (~/.mozilla/default/<random>/chrome/userContent.cs s under Linux):

@media screen {
* {
font-size: 28px !important;
line-height: 30px !important;
}
}

The great part about this is that it doesn't mess up the layout as often as setting the minimum size font does. Also, it doesn't affect printing at all (I don't remember whether setting the minimum size affects printing or not, but this sure doesn't).

steveha

I'm at work, otherwise I'd find out for myself...

[kotj.mf]

How's font rendering?

I'm running the default Moz 1.2 install in SuSE 1.2, and antialiasing is complete crap. To the point that I've switched to Konq.

I mean, I'd rather have no antialiasing at all (a la IE) than the halfassed way it's implemented in 1.2. Actually, I'd prefer decent bitmap rendering in the first place. On my cheapass, washed-out notebook screen, small AAed fonts are only slightly better than illegible.

I'd really really like to switch back, too. I'm less concerned with load times than the responsiveness of the GUI, and for that, Mozilla/Phoenix beat Konqueror hands down. It shouldn't take 3-10 seconds for a background tab to open.

Still, the Konq's better font rendering is enough to make me stick with it.

Keywords, people, keywords!

[Millennium]

Combining shortcuts with keywords will give you guys what you want and more.

I have a bunch of these. Now I can type "search terms" to search on Google, "nodesearch terms" to search on Everything2, "bug number" to go straight to that bug in BugZilla, and so forth. Flexible, powerful, and damn cool.

I use Safari a lot nowadays, and keyword searching is the one feature I really miss. Well, that and a decent JavaScript console. I hope these things get added soon.

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[Tyreth]

Maybe I can do it easier than I imagine :) I just need to look into it, and find out which browser will let me do it in Linux.

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[chefbimbo]

You honestly expect me to type search if I want to search google? WTF are you? My mother telling me to clean up my flat?

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[Millennium]

I suppose the analogy could be made, yes. The idea is that, by giving the Google search a name, you can give other names to other kinds of searches, and then use the addressbar for all of them.

I suppose that, if you wanted to, you could use "g" instead of "search", thus saving a few "precious" keystrokes if you're really that lazy. This is what makes keywords superior to separate searrch fields, which unfortunately debuted in Firebird and have infected other browsers ever since: near-infinite configurability.

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[C32]

Exactly. This is actually something IE does right, the ie powertoys thingy for IE5 which also works in IE6 adds such easily-configurable searches.
I use "g" for google, "av" etc..
You wouldn't believe how much time this saves over the moz/firebird way of doing things, or having to go to the actual page (shudder).

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[ssstraub]

Um, I use "g" for google in firebird. Been using that since 0.4.

Seems to me the "moz/firebird" way of doing things is exactly the same except we don't have to download powertoys...

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[RdsArts]

Moz/Firebird does that too.

You can easily set up a quick seach for anything. Right now, when I type:

google search terms

it'll do a google for the terms search terms. When I type

dict word

I get a dictionary search of the word. ANd I can add new terms with ease.

In fact, those little nicities are the reason I will never run anything but Galeon or Moz/Firebird on any of my computers, as they both have means for doing the above

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[slamb]

Agreed, they're wonderful. I've got some I haven't seen in other replies here, so here are all of mine:

• "g" - google
• "gg" - google groups
• "err" - Oracle error number search
• "meta" - Oracle metalink search
• "e2s" - English->Spanish dictionary
• "s2e" - Spanish->English dictionary
• "dict" - English dictionary
• "cpan" - Perl module search

You could also do Bugzilla bug numbers, Amazon auction numbers, Microsoft/Apple/Whatever KnowledgeBase, any one website's search feature...the possibilities are endless.

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[Anonymous Coward]

Be a man and run regedt32 then.

Typical Microslop -- invent a cool feature, except bury it in the registry. Then the Mozilla people come around and take all the credit for it.

Re:Keywords, people, keywords!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

man....

[dance2die]

Man.. I am utterly disappointed by it's Front-end user GUI... Doesn't look as spicy as v0.5... Utterly utterly disappointed... But speed ain't so bad. as well as Options Dialog box. Now that's some improvement.

Re:man....

[shione]

You can change the themes back to 0.5 at the texturizer.net website. its called orbit I believe. Apparently most people didnt like the look of it thats why they changed it. Personally, I didn't mind it one bit.

Re:man....

[SouthwindCG]

I agree, Orbit is nice. First thing I did after installing Firebird 0.6 was to grab the old Orbit theme (and a couple of others too) and put the UI back to how I had it with Phoenix. :) So far I'm liking Firebird. Good stuff.

Get 7Zip

[SoSueMe]

here or Get IZarc here.

Re:Get WinZip

[sepluv]

Winzip sucks.

It is the worst (de)compression/archiving program I have ever enocuntered.

Saved windows...

[tit0.c]

Apart from the mouse gestures the best thing about opera is the ability to save tabs.Very handy in case of a crash....

Re:Saved windows...

[grayrest]

I would have loved that feature for Mozilla 0.93, but it just doesn't seem necessary any more. I've never had Phoenix crash unless I was developing and extension. I've been using it since 0.2 in October.

Re:Saved windows...

[Dthoma]

Another Mozilla based browser, Galeon has this feature too. It's currently my favourite browser, though I'm quite impressed by my (so far brief) trial of Firebird.

Re:Saved windows...

[swarsron]

This is my reason to stay with opera. I use ion as wm (give it a try if you like working with your keyboard instead of your mouse) and kill every window i close (so i can close every application with one touch). With opera this is no problem because on next startup i have everything like it was before but with firebird all tabs have gone.

StrokeIt?

[allanj]

Well, if you want mouse gestures, you can always get StrokeIt. It adds mouse gestures to Windows as a whole. Essentially, it recognizes a gesture and performs a macro based on which gesture it was and which application is active. It can even do global gestures like close, minimize all, and restore all.

StrokeIt? StrokeIt?!! I would never EVER buy anything called StrokeIt, if there is even the slightest chance of my wife finding out I bought something called that.

What about performance on older machines?

[ngunton]

Something I don't hear talked about all that much is how slow Mozilla is compared to Netscape 4.x. I use a 450 MHz desktop, which is perfectly adequate speed-wise for every other application that I use (including software development on both Windows and Linux). I can't for the life of me understand why "progress" always has to involve slower, bigger, more complicated applications. It happened with Windows, and now it seems to be happening with Linux and Open Source too. What on earth is Mozilla doing so different to what the older Netscape 4.x did? They both are supposed to be just web browsers. But 4.x is so much faster and more responsive. Sure, 4.x is getting long in the tooth now with regard to standards, but come on - if they could write something this fast five years ago, why is the latest and greatest so demanding of CPU? From an end-user point of view, it really doesn't do anything different - it renders web pages and does email. Why should that be so CPU intensive? I understand that Mozilla uses XUL, and while it's a laudable goal (cross platform), in the end I judge software these days by how usable it is in real life. And I'm sorry to say that when it takes a good three to five seconds just to bring up a "new message" or "preferences" window, that is unusable to me. Are we moving away from compiled code and towards interpreted scripts for everything, no matter what the cost in terms of performance? And surely if so much is interpreted, shouldn't the code size go down, not up? I'm sad that nobody seems to be talking about this. Since when is a 450 MHz computer too slow for web browsing and email???? I can understand it being slow if I were trying to render 3D animations, but come on...

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

programmers are very VERY lazy today. they do not write optimized code that is fast.

A REAL programmer writes an app that runs as fast as it can while being stable.... something that only 1 out of every 100 "programmers" have the ability to do.

and it cannot be done in C++

so your answer is lazy and unskilled programmers.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't for the life of me understand why "progress" always has to involve slower, bigger, more complicated applications.

"Progress" often involves adding new features. Features don't just magically appear, they need memory and cpu time.

Are we moving away from compiled code and towards interpreted scripts for everything, no matter what the cost in terms of performance?

That is a straw-man argument you are constructing. Nobody is saying that. What is being said, however, is that as computer capabilities are increasing rapidly, we should take advantage of that. Programmer time is limited, and much more expensive than cpu time. Would you like to take time away from the programmer coding, say, the routines to resize text so that people with less-than-perfect eyesight can surf more easily, and instead assign him to optimising some code so that it starts up 5% faster for you?

When developing a complex application like this, tradeoffs are always made. Don't bellyache about the speed when you aren't contributing in any way to the project.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[ngunton]

I don't particularly agree with you about C++. It is certainly possible to write fast, efficient code using C++ (I've used it since 1989). As with any language, you can also create a real mess. I don't think C++ is the problem here, but rather the use of XUL for all user interface tasks. For some reason the implementation of this requires a lot of processing just to bring up a window or pretty much do anything significant. It's even more sluggish than Java.

Rather than being lazy, I would posit that the Mozilla developers all must have relatively newer, faster machines to develop on, because if they had a box like mine then I don't see how they could be satisfied with the performance of Mozilla. I guess you can argue that you need to move with the times, and I agree to an extent, but then I go and look again at Netscape 4.x, and how fast it is. And how it was written five years ago or more. And Mozilla really isn't doing all that much more.

I truly do not care about all the fancy features such as "skins" and tabs and "intelligent" browsing. I just want a fast, lean browser that does the job, adheres to standards and gives me the ability to customize stuff (up to a point - take that too far and you end up in slow, bloated XUL land)...

JMHO, of course. I am not slamming the developers of Mozilla, but rather speaking out loud about what is, for me personally, the biggest issue with Mozilla.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Utter bollocks. A good programmer does nothing of the sort. There are tons of requirements from software that aren't speed and stability, and when producing an application, you have to balance them all out.

For instance, you will often find that the fastest code to accomplish a certain goal is spaghetti. A good programmer will evaluate the situation. Is it somewhere that is particularly time-sensitive? How big is the team working on the project? How stable are the requirements?

Yes, it may well be that it's best to use the spaghetti routine rather than the maintainable routine. But any decent programmer (as opposed to somebody fresh out of Uni who thinks he Knows It All (tm)) would tend to write maintainable code by default.

Only unskilled programmers aim for speed as a primary goal - they are lacking a vital skill - the ability to work well as part of a team, and the ability to construct a large application.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[Markus Registrada]

If writing "an app that runs as fast as it can while being stable ... cannot be done in C++", then it can't be done at all. Of course, Mozilla isn't written in C++, it's written partly in slightly-extended C (like the C with Classes of the mid-'80s), and largely in XUL, a scripting language.

(Imagine, an Anonymous Coward demonstrating bone-crushing ignorance. What next, flying mallards? Swimming trout?)

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[ngunton]

Would you like to take time away from the programmer coding, say, the routines to resize text so that people with less-than-perfect eyesight can surf more easily, and instead assign him to optimising some code so that it starts up 5% faster for you?

I was expecting someone to say pretty much what you're saying, and there really isn't a "right" or "wrong" answer here. It's a matter of opinion. In my opinion, it's not a question of making something load 5% faster for me at the expense of visually challenged users. That is being way too black and white - and by the way, it's a pretty nasty way of making your point. If you're going to use that kind of argument, why not say that the developers are discriminating against poorer people who can't afford faster, newer, more expensive computers (e.g. many schools)??? And finally, we're not talking about a minor optimization of 5% here, we're talking about the application being actually unusable for someone with a computer that is perfectly adequate for all other apps on the desktop, including software development.

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. As a software developer myself I can understand the desire to keep adding features, but I don't see why it should be mutually exclusive to have both performance and stability and (some) features.

Don't bellyache about the speed when you aren't contributing in any way to the project.

This is a crass statement. Are you saying that everyone should just keep quiet and not say what's on their mind? This reminds me of the current political climate in America, where if you criticize the government's policies then you are labeled as "unpatriotic" or "UnAmerican".

Let's be very clear: I am absolutely free to comment on something that I am not contributing to, just as other people are absolutely free to comment on stuff I do, but that they are not contributing to. The argument that criticism is only valid if you are a contributor is a classic knee-jerk playground response which is on the same level as "Well, if you don't agree with the government, then don't live in America". If nobody commented on stuff, then things would not improve. I can't do everything, I can't participate in every single thing in this world that I have an opinion about. However I do value input from other thinking people regarding the stuff I do participate in. Sometimes the most valuable input comes from people who are not deeply involved with a project, because they are not too close to the woods to see the trees.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[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

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[ngunton]

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.

Yeah, I've heard all the hype. All I can go by is my day-to-day experience, which is that Netscape 4.x is more usable than Mozilla at the moment. I fully recognize all the improvements in adhering to Web standards, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter if the app runs like treacle.

I'm not happy with Netscape 4.x, for what it's worth. It has a lot of problems with CSS and JavaScript, and it crashes these days more than it used to (probably because web designers are writing for standards which 4.x didn't know about at the time). However I'm more willing to put up with some flakiness in the standards dept than extreme slowness. Nothing more frustrating than clicking on a button and waiting a few seconds for a window to appear.

BTW - By "pretty much the same thing" I was speaking of the large picture of getting me around the Web, not regarding specific low-level functions. Of course Mozilla has a lot more going on. No question. Just wish it could have been implemented with more of an architectural eye toward performance. It's certainly possible to make cross-platform GUI's without resorting to stuff like XUL - just see wxWindows for one example of a C++ toolkit that runs on Windows, X, Mac etc.

Re:What about performance on older machines?

[binford2k]

I use a 450 MHz desktop, which is perfectly adequate speed-wise for every other application that I use (including software development on both Windows and Linux).
...
And finally, we're not talking about a minor optimization of 5% here, we're talking about the application being actually unusable for someone with a computer that is perfectly adequate for all other apps on the desktop, including software development.

You gotta be joking. You claim that Mozilla on a 450 is unuseable?? I regularly use Mozilla on an old AMD 350 and it is just fine.

Pie Menus

[jefu]

I've been using the phoenix/mozilla "Radial Context" (ie Pie Menu) implementation for a while now and far prefer it to the gestures stuff. And its been solid and well performing for the most part (sometimes a nightly build will kill it, but thats not that common now).

Re:Pie Menus

[Foresto]

Yes, I use Pie Menus on Mozilla & Firebird as well. They're like gestures, but with some visual feedback, so each gesture is easy to learn. Get it here.

Re:Pie Menus

[hexxx]

I have to "me too" this post. Pie menus are really, really, REALLY great. The normal menus feel very stupid now.

Everyone

[Apreche]

Ok, what I see happening here is a bunch of people who use Opera or Moz are going to try out Firebird now that it is at .6. The ones who use IE arent' a problem because they will be blown away and convert, I've seen it time and time again.
The people who use Opera or Moz or Konqueror or something else aren't going to be taken in. Mainly because they've already seen most of the features before. But I assure you, Firebird is better. You just need to go get the extensions. Without the Tabbed Browsing Extension you lose a lot of tab functionality. Without the Mycroft search additions the search bar in the top right is only half as useful.

Go to www.texturizer.net/firebird/

get the extensions that you want and need.
The themes are also there, I prefer phusion

There are more at www.mozdev.org

Do that before you judge this software. A raw install is awesome compared to IE and stuff, but the extensions are what really make Firebird the best browser.

Re:Everyone

[bogie]

Not to Troll but IE users are the ones to worry about. Opera and Konq users probably make up like .025% of web users. Its not even worth working on Safari(I guess Konq) users, Apple only makes up like 4% of computer users.

Work on IE users, they are the ones that make up 95% of the Net. If Mozilla is to ever make any impact(doubtful without desktop bundling) than you need to beat Redmonites first.

Finally

[gnuLNX]

This version of mozilla rocks. It is very fast and appears very lightweight. You get the functionality of mozilla with the lightweightness of konqueror. Ver nice guys/girls...very nice.

Thanks to everyone at the mozilla team.

First Impressions.

[jellomizer]

I am comparing Mozilla Firebird with the Apple Safari Browser. Its a pritty good shot for a Mac Port of a browser. The Bootup time and render time is accecptible. Its still a fraction slower then Safari, both in boot time and render time. Firebird doese handle flash better then Safari but Safari has been slow with flash. As of right now the major problem I have with Firebird is the fact the scrool bar is extreamly slow but that should be an easy fix.
But I am still impressed for a version designed to be ran primarly on Windows and Linux platforms. Firebird runs quite well. With a little work and some healthy competition from both Mozilla and Safari. I think there is a chance of getting 2 really good browsers.

Close all tabs

[Photon01]

In mozilla, when i right click on a tab, i have a close other tabs option. I use this alot, and its the only yhting that stops me using firebird.

Why hasnt this been included, or am i just missing a way to turn it on?

Re:Close all tabs

[0xA]

Go to the Forums at mozillazine

www.mozillazine.org/forums

There is a sticky thread that talks about tabs, all you have to do is snag the tab extensions and you'll have that and a bunch of other stuff.

A

Re:Close all tabs

[bwt]

I've got this option, but then, I installed the tabbed browsing extensions via Tools->Options->Extensions->Get New Extensions

zippy may ass

[RalphBNumbers]

What exactly are you smoking?
I just tried Firebird .6 and it was very noticeably slower than the latest Camino and Safari on my machine. (not to mention all the stuff that doesn't work)
Sure it's faster than IE and Mozilla, but what isn't?

Re:zippy may ass

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, that's right. what are you smoking?

it is faster, your machine is broken.

Re:zippy may ass

[0x0d0a]

You know, it's a good bet that you and the parent poster have different settings for your different browsers, which is the critical factor here.

Awesome...

[cdemon6]

I'm trying it already and it's really a *lot* better than mozilla 1.3.1 i used before...

workaround for 'relocation error'

[Netmonger]

In order to get it to run on the latest gentoo distro, I actually have to start it with: ./run-mozilla.sh ./MozillaFirebird-bin

from within the install directory - this wasnt the case with Phoenix..

'Trying to execute the MozillaFirebird executable, resulted in:

relocation error: ./MozillaFirebird-bin: undefined symbol: __vt_14nsXPIDLCString

Other than that - WORKS GREAT.

Re:I'm at work, otherwise I'd find out for myself.

[BrokenHalo]

You've got a bad build then. Mozilla has had good anti-aliasing for a long time. Is SUSE using the binary that comes direct from mozilla.org? (I.e. with no xft enabled?) I'm using one that came with Dropline Gnome (for Slackware) and font rendering is just gorgeous. There was a time when I used to think font rendering was much better handled under winbloze, but nowadays whenever I have to work at one of those machines I always find text hard to read. Just goes to show how quickly we get spoilt.

Fix the installers first

[Politburo]

Phoenix/Firebird needs to stop working on other things, and fix the installers. I have to manually remove my phoenix directory before installing, and I can't use my old profile? Call it a troll, but I've been using .5 for a while, and am not going to upgrade until I can use my old data reliably. It took enough playing around to get some plugins working right the first time around. I don't want to play the game again.

Re:Fix the installers first

[asa]

Call it a troll, but I've been using .5 for a while, and am not going to upgrade until I can use my old data reliably. It took enough playing around to get some plugins working right the first time around. I don't want to play the game again.

"Call me crazy if you want. I'm using a pre-alpha snapshot from 6 months ago and I'm not about to upgrade to another pre-alpha testing build until these pre-alpha test builds are bug-free and release quality. What are those crazy open source developers smoking? "

--Asa

Re:Fix the installers first

[Politburo]

Yes the typical response. I'm not asking for release quality in every aspect of the product. I'm just asking that it can handle the basic function of installing itself.

Another thing, if it's so "pre-alpha", why does almost everything else work so well?

Re:Fix the installers first

[asa]

Yes the typical response. I'm not asking for release quality in every aspect of the product. I'm just asking that it can handle the basic function of installing itself.

Another thing, if it's so "pre-alpha", why does almost everything else work so well?

Lots works and lots doesn't. That's what you get with an 0.6 :-) If you're willing to risk additional bugs then feel free to just unpack this and use it with your old profile but it's possible that something changed in how we read or write some of the profile data so you could experience problems. If you experience problems upgrading from one testing build to the other without starting fresh, please don't file bugs until you've tested with a clean profile like we suggest in the release notes.

(And thanks for taking the time to download and test 0.5. If you actually use that as your regular browser then I strongly recommend that you get 0.6 because it really is much better.)

--Asa

Re:Fix the installers first

[thinkninja]

.6 loads your .5 profile automagically. the only thing i have to do now is reinstall extensions and re-add searchplugins. i didn't even delete my c:\phoenix directory since .6's directory is 'mozillafirebird'. easy as eating pancakes.

Re:Fix the installers first

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, when the name was changed from Phoenix to Mozilla-Firebird, then the download created a directory (linux) by the same name. All my icewm menu and FVWM fvwm2rc files have to be changed, too.
I used to upgrade to latest Phoenix and not have to go back and change the "start buttons" for these other wm's. Otherwise, I like Moz*, using 30426 now,
and think it's the best browser for Linux.

Re:Fix the installers first

[klui]

Actually, I do like the fact that Firebird is installed by copying a folder to anywhere on my hard drive under Windows. Very Mac-like and very simple. Only problem is the profiles. That aspect should be automatically when it launches and finds a prior version of a profile. But I'm willing to live with it for a pre-release.

Backwards compatible!

[Bish.dk]

Yay! As a developer of a Moz-extension, I'm very pleased to see that Firebird didn't break compatibility with older extensions... Unlike big brother Mozilla, which breaks it for every .1 upgrade. If they keep this up for future versions, I'll probably stop maintaining for Mozilla and just concentrate on Firebird.

Take that, Gates

[alpharoid]

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?

Re:Take that, Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

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

How about the fact everyone of these features was in Opera first and for a long time? It's not M$ but its a close source company that has been the blueprint for all browsers the last few years even if nobody wants to admit it.
oops, I didn't act like a good little zealot, I better post as anonymous now.

Re:Take that, Gates

[shione]

so true and the saddest thing about it is, nowhere will you find ie7 on MickeySofts program-upgrades roadmap.

Monopolies stiffle innovation = FACT!

Re:Take that, Gates

[JKR]

Innovation costs time and money; a business like MS won't invest if they don't have to, and as far as they are concerned IE has achieved its goal of browser dominance.

Once this is sufficiently threatened, they will react. Once, say, Firebird picks up 50% of the market, they will react. It's just-in-time management. Until then there are other fish to fry.

You might think that poking the sleeping dragon isn't such a smart idea, though.

Jon.

Re:Take that, Gates

[Brummund]

Yes, and by the look of that page, Ballmer is completely right. There is NO FEATURE on that page that wasn't invented somewhere else. Or perhaps you could point out Firebirds unique features?

Re:Take that, Gates

[sepluv]

There is certainly some truth to what you say, although MS's software seems to be almost as bad in areas (like server OS's) where they are threatened.

You might think that poking the sleeping dragon isn't such a smart idea, though.

Ummm...excuse me but weren't you talking about MS here?

I think you'll find Mozilla is the (wide-awake) dragon and MSIE is a blue (IMO dead "e").

Although, I can see how "poking the dead letter (which is a super-unintelligent shade of the colour blue [STR]) isn't such a smart idea" does not make for such an effective argument. 'Nuff said.

Re:Whatever.

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

Well, yes, I remember hearing about Firebird - here on Slashdot, no less, because it had a backdoor superuser account ( from back when it was the closed source 'Inprise' DB ) that nobody noticed for ages - despite the fact the source had been opened since the 25th of July, 2000. ( Vulnerability was published December, 2001 ). Citation.

"Many Eyes" indeed.

Must try extensions for Firebird

[Anonymous Coward]

Download Statusbar

Flash click to view
(still quite new, but amazing)

Just Segfaults on Linux RH9

[Anonymous Coward]

.... won't run ... err fly.

middle mouse button support

[nonane]

The windows dragging feature is MUCH needed!

Windows Installer

[k2enemy]

Windows users can download 0.6 with a Windows installer. This will add registery keys for you, making plugin installations much, much easier. It's unofficial, but very convenient.

A Little /. History

[chasingporsches]

About a zillion people wrote to announce Mozilla 0.6

i guess that was, what, 2-3 years ago? i wonder how many people submitted the story about Firebird 0.6... :-)

Coming Soon!

[Sebastopol]

Mozilla Trans Am and Mozilla IROC-Z !!!

Sorry... Firebird takes me back to my gearhead days...

Size of the browser...

[hkmwbz]

Have they managed to make it smaller, and will it continue to shrink?

If you look at Opera, you will notice that 7.0 was smaller than 6.05, 7.1 was smaller than 7.0, and 7.11 is even smaller than 7.0 again. Opera is just a 3.2 MB download right now. Will Firebird ever get smaller from here?

Re:Size of the browser...

[shione]

Phoenix comes with its own java console. Opera is 12mb if my memory serves me right, with java included.

Re:Size of the browser...

[William Tanksley]

Yes, reduced size is a continued goal, and there's still some waste to trim. So you should expect to se the size continue to go down.

Although I honestly don't know whether it'll ever reach the size of Opera without Java; that's elegantly crafted. In theory they could, since they could pull the Java console out of the app and put it into an extension; but I don't know whether that'll ever be a priority.

-Billy

Re:Size of the browser...

[hkmwbz]

Java console? Which is? It has its own Java implementation? Its own JRE?

Opera has a Java console as well, but that's just where the Java output from applets end up.

So what's the deal here?

Re:Size of the browser...

[shione]

I'm saying when you include the java console, opera is a bigger download than firebird.

I just looked it up. opera 7.11 with java is 12.5 mb
phoenix is 6.66 (heh) so its a little over half the size.

You can skip on java for opera if you already have it installed but for someone looking for a sole browser to replace the default one phoenix is a smaller download. Not to mention XP sp1 no longer ships with java included.

Re:Size of the browser...

[shione]

nevermind all that. I got confused with javascript, phoenix doesnt come with its own version of java. ....opera wins...this one :)

Re:Size of the browser...

[hkmwbz]

Ah, ok. Well, no problem. The size of the Java download isn't Opera or Phoenix's problem anyway, but Sun. They are the bloatware authors. It is very nice that both Opera and Phoenix (and hopefully Firebird) are aiming for a smaller download size. This is rather uncommon in the software world.

I am still hoping that Firebird will do away with some bloat as well! At least both Opera and Firebird are tiny compared to MSIE.

Re:StrokeIt? - its a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

think about the name. It is basically a joke about people who use mouse gestures needing to use their machines with one hand. Take a guess what the other hand is doing and the name makes sense.

Trying it right now...

[zulux]

On my Mandrake 9.1 - it load and opens web pages a lot faster the Konquror.

I like - nice and simple.

TROLL!!!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Just kidding ;)

Thanks for the awesome info!

Xft binaries?

[crivens]

Has anyone seen or posted any 0.6 binaries that include Xft support?

Thanks

Re:Xft binaries?

[pr0c]

I don't want to get anyone slashdotted so i won't provide links but yes i'm using a XFT build right now. Look around @ mozillazine forums or just build it yourself.

Just a small clarification!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashcode puts spaces inbetween the code. (ex. MozillaFirebird becomes Mozilla Firebird). Just get rid of the spaces.

LSXCommand

[reconn]

LSXCommand is reason enough for me to use Litestep (my favorite release), and it seems like it would be for all of you too. I have an extensive engines.list file full of shortcuts. I can search dictionary.com, google, allmusic, imdb, ebay, amazon, pricewatch -- all from a textfield on my desktop.

Easy search fields in browsers have never been that much of a selling point for me.

Re:LSXCommand

[RichardX]

I'm not familiar with this LSXCommand of which you speak, but I suspect it's something like the rather nifty slickrun for windows. Basically, it's a small floating text-field with configurable keywords.. for a simple example, you can have it launch calculator with 'calc' or whatever, but where it gets much more handy is defining keywords to search google or dictionary.com, stuff like that. It's handy, unobtrusive, and free.. definately worth checking out - I always feel crippled now using a windows system without it

The last things stopping me from switching:

[xenoweeno]

Maybe someone can point out how to change these by editing config files so that I can send IE away for good:

• I want to sort bookmarks with folders first.
• I always want the tab bar displayed.
• I want bookmarks (clicked in both the sidebar and in the Bookmarks Toolbar) to always open on a new tab.

Until then, I'm still using NetCaptor, in which the tabbed interface is much more intuitive and under my control. IMHO, of course.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[pr0c]

* I want to sort bookmarks with folders first.
So click and drag them.

* I always want the tab bar displayed.
You need tab browser extension HERE

* I want bookmarks (clicked in both the sidebar and in the Bookmarks Toolbar) to always open on a new tab.
Middle click it and/or Use the same tool i already pointed out, Tab Browser Extension.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[xenoweeno]

So click and drag them.

No, I want it done for me. The computer can do it much faster than I can. That's why I have a computer: it's supposed to make my life easier.

You need tab browser extension HERE

No, I want it built in. Further, the author declares that Phoenix 0.5 support is "only an experiment." I do not want to have to keep tabs on a plugin, making sure I have the latest version and waiting on a new version when Firebird is updated, for what should be the relatively simple task of keeping the tab bar visible at all times.

Middle click it

No, I want to left click it. I never want to open a bookmark in an existing tab in which I am alerady viewing a document, and middle-clicking activates other features of my mouse that interfere.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[bogie]

"I want to sort bookmarks with folders first."

Folders are first by default. You can also move them around any way you want with the bookmark manager.

"I always want the tab bar displayed."
Get Tabbrowser Extension

"I want bookmarks (clicked in both the sidebar and in the Bookmarks Toolbar) to always open on a new tab."
Get Tabbrowser Extension

http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensio ns .html.en

Mozilla has 99% of the features most people want either by default or through extensions all it takes is a little research or a quick question at the Mozillazine forums. Its too bad more people don't realize that.

Also for future reference.
http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.h tml

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[pr0c]

Stick to your piece of shit IE. We definitly don't want people like you to begin with.

Everyone doesn't want the features you want, by adding features like that to firebird you end up with a bloated piece of shit.

Just because some asshole is too lazy to install an extension or to click 1 button over on the mouse to open in tabs is no reason to add many lines of code to the source.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Use the enhanced tabbed browsing extensions found here to customize tabbed browsing to your heart's content.

As for sorting bookmarks, you can do that. Go to Bookmarks->Manage. Change the display order.

Cheers,

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[BZ]

> Stick to your piece of shit IE. We definitly don't
> want people like you to begin with.

Who is this "we" you speak of? I don't see any checkins to Mozilla Firebird from any CVS account that has any resemblance to your username....

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[pr0c]

I try to get more users, file bug reports, provide support and help the linux newbies install it.

We = current user base, maybe if you tried to use what little brains you may have you could have figured that out.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[samael]

No, I want it built in.

The whole point of Phoenix is that only the essentials will be built in. If it's not something that 99% of the population wants, then it's an extension. That way people can build the Phoenix that they want.

I use the tabbed browser extensions myself and it would, indeed, be very useful to not have to add them in my hand. But it's a 2 minute job whenever I upgrade and I appreciate the design philosophy that means I don't have 30 things built in that I don't use.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[Anonymous Coward]

* I want to sort bookmarks with folders first.

That is the default behaviour.

* I always want the tab bar displayed.

Set browser.tabs.autoHide to false in about:config. I think I saw a bug for a GUI option, so this should be easier in the next release.

* I want bookmarks (clicked in both the sidebar and in the Bookmarks Toolbar) to always open on a new tab.

Then you want bad UI. Sorry. Everywhere in the browser middle-click means open in a new tab or window and left click means open in the current tab. That extends to the bookmark menu so that it's consistent and easy to learn. If you really want to change it, either try the Tabbrowser Extensions or hack the relevant javascript file on your local copy. That will probably be as easy as changing a single number.

In general, the importance of the Tabbrowser Extensions is overplayed - the defaults are generally quite good.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[Joe Tie.]

The only thing keeping me switching is spellchecking in text boxes on forums. I've been loving this feature ever since it first appeared in Konqueror. Trying to live without it would be like trying to browse without tabs.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[xenoweeno]

As for sorting bookmarks, you can do that. Go to Bookmarks->Manage. Change the display order.

Display order != folders first.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[xenoweeno]

Folders are first by default.

I can assure you, with 100% certainty, that folders are most definitely not first in my bookmarks.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[xenoweeno]

The whole point of Phoenix is that only the essentials will be built in.

The scheduling system for checking web pages for updates and the JavaScript console are essential?

We're not talking about forcibly embedding an instant messenging client or adding a WYSIWYG HTML editor. We're talking about basic behavior of the browser's interface. I contend that the latter is essential.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[Anonymous Coward]

lol ur a fag rofl asshole hahahaha!!!11111

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[asa]

The scheduling system for checking web pages for updates and the JavaScript console are essential?

And that may very well be removed. It's mostly unused and not very well implemented.

--Asa

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[MyHair]

I always want the tab bar displayed.

You don't need to add an extension for that. Type "about:config" in your Firebird browser, scroll down to browser.tabs.autohide, right-click to modify and type "false". I just learned that the other day. Whee, I'm a uber geek now.

Re:The last things stopping me from switching:

[BZ]

Um. As someone who actually works on developing the browser in question, I'd much appreciate it if you did not make inflammatory statements and make them sound like they are made in my name and the names of my colleagues.

Thank you.

Bloody web browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bookmark functionality, email, and plenty of other half-baked functionality ought to be ripped out of web browsers and stuck in window managers and free-standing X clients. Browsers ought to be able to render troff, postcript, pdf, and (pick your favorite document language) just as well as HTML so that you don't need those stupid plug-ins and xpdf, xman/gman, etc.

I love this!

[Chuck Chunder]

It's great that we have an Open Source V Closed Source fight (floabw) on which opinions aren't distorted by one side being the MS behemoth. It's cool to see two sets of obviously talented engineers working so hard at something and in the process demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of both models.

Re:I love this!

[a8f11t18]

I agree.. opera rocks :) Mm what was the question again?
Anyway.. I love opera.. and the whole philoshophy behind
opera is something you just have to dig in this age of
stupid and bloated software. Opera is light, clever, functional
and oooh so darn sexy. Well yes I'm a zealot. BUT.. if something happened to opera one day.. well.. THEN it would be good to have the moz-thing as a backup :)

Forms Auto-Complete

[ezraekman]

From the known bugs list: "Form auto-complete is still an unstable feature and may lead to crashes. Disabling of form auto-completion is not working." Uh... hello? I tend to use this feature quite a bit... and though it's temporary unavailability is something I can deal with, having a feature that crashes the browser and can't be turned off is just idiotic.

Re:Forms Auto-Complete

[falsification]

You can turn it off. Just go into the prefs.

Moz not best of breed

[0x0d0a]

The problem is that while Moz is a good web browser, there are *much* better mail clients and newsreaders for the platforms Moz runs on.

I'd rather use the best of breed for each thing.

Prefs still need major work

[Selanit]

I've been using Firebird (neé Phoenix) as my default browser since 0.2, in both Windows and Linux. I love it. It's great. Hurrah for the developers.

That said, I've had one major peeve ever since I first tried it: the preferences control is a joke. While this new version (I've just tried it out) is better in some respects, they've got a loooong way to go.

Some specific points:

• Setting the home page should have a button labelled "Choose file . . ." I know I can go File->Open then re-open the preferences and click "Use Current". But that's a pain in the ass.
  
• The "Set default browser" option (Windows-specific) is imprecise. Clicking it associates Firebird with loads of file types, including bitmap files (.bmp). Bring back the old-style Mozilla pref where you click a check-box next to each file type you wanted associated. Hide it behind an "advanced" button if you must.
• Moz is capable of disabling animated .gifs, which makes browsing a lot nicer. Unfortunately, there's no control of that in the preferences.
  

Which brings me to the "about:config" screen. It shows you a list of all the prefs you can control, including things like gif animation. In principle this is a great idea -- the ultimate "advanced" tab that allows power-users to tweak to their heart's content.

In practice, it's horrible. It just prints out a list of every preference there is, in alphabetical order. There are over five hundred of them. You have to wade through hundreds of lines to find the one you want. What's more, there's no indication what they do beyond the names of the prefs. Some of the time that makes it clear -- but lots of the time it doesn't. For example, "browser.related.enabled". That's set to "true" by default. I wonder what it controls?

Then, once you've found what you want -- in my case "image.animation_mode" to control gif animations -- you have to figure out what value to set it to. Altering values in about:config is basically identical to altering values with the registry editor in Windows, and we all know how easily that can screw something up. If a value is boolean, that's fairly easy to figure out. In the case of "image.animation_mode", however, you have to guess what string the developer picked to signify the behaviors. At least right-clicking an option lets you reset it to default if you screw up.

Basically, about:config needs some major work. For one thing, there are about a zillion options in there that no longer apply to Firebird -- editor.* and mail.* for example. Those should be removed. The ones that are left should be put in expandable trees by their first word so you don't have to wade through dozens of options you're not interested in -- eg browser.* would have (+) next to it and expand to show all options beginning with "browser.". There should also be something explaining what all these options do and what their values are. Ideally that'd be a little ? next to each option that would pop up a box explaining the term, but a monolithic document somewhere on the web would work just as well.

Anyway, I've groused long enough. It's a great browser, I just think it should be easier to control all those options. Splitting it into a "basic" and "advanced" config panels is a fine idea, but it needs a lot more work!

Re:Prefs still need major work

[ninjakitty]

That's why Phoenix's plugins are so cool, Preferential is a plugin that makes about:config a little more mangable.

It groups things by catagory, so you aren't totally overwhelmed like the first time you see about:config

Most importantly it has a description for a good majority of the item.

Extensions are cool! I just wish they would include a way to uninstall them, it can't be that hard...

Re:Prefs still need major work

[BZ]

> It shows you a list of all the prefs you can
> control

Actually, it shows a list of all the prefs that have a value set. Which is not the same thing at all -- there are a lot more prefs that you can control than there are prefs that have a value set by default.

Well, i just did it...

[freedommatters]

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?

ta
john
send fake stories to your friends with the Not True Times

Re:Well, i just did it...

[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

Re:Well, i just did it...

[riscthis]

suggestions for best non-outlook email program?

I use PocoMail, definitely the best e-mail client I've used on Windows. It's fast, compact, has its own HTML renderer that can block remote images, and generally has lots of neat usability features. Discovered it a couple of months ago and immediately switched from Eudora.

It's shareware, but there's a decent trial period on it (when expired, it will simply disable checking for new mail), and it only costs about $25.

Downloaded 5.0 yesterday. damn. It's good.

[zymano]

Yah, like it. Damn nice. Back button is quick for my old computer. Like the image controls . very nice. Don't care for Flash ads or java applets.

They need to slim it down some more. Get rid of XUL if possible.

immediate downloading

[ceswiedler]

One nice feature of Opera that I'd like to see in other browsers is that it starts downloading a file you want to save even before you say where to save it. You click, it brings up a file browser to say where to put it, but while you're poking around your filesystem, it's already downloading it. Quite often by the time I decide where to put it, it's already completely saved. Nice.

Re:immediate downloading

[cookiepus]

Some more obscure browsers, like MSIE, do this also.

Re:immediate downloading

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Mozilla has this now, I think it came in 1.2.

WHAT ABOUT BANNERBLIND! ARG!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I can not live without bannerblind. As much as I love Firebird, I just can't stand the internet without Bannerblind. When Firebird has those capabilities, or Bannerblind works with it, only then can I switch. After browsing the web with Firebird, it was the first time in months I ever used something other then Moz+Bannerblind and I realized the web is FULL OF ADS! It's been nice not seeing a single banner add.

http://bannerblind.mozdev.org/

Already implemented (unofficially)

[cioxx]

They should make an installer before 1.0

There is already an installer which fetches everything from the nightly trunk. It's not an official release. I do NOT recommend it since 0.6 got released. It *might* break some of the application associations when you decide to uninstall it for whatever reason.

http://blackdiamond.mozdev.org/installer/

Otherwise it's an excellent start. Sooner or later, they'll roll this into the official releases.

Radial Context menus

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer these to mouse gestures. They're just as fast but there is no memorization needed, so you can perform frequently used functions quickly and not-so-frequently used functions almost as quickly.

http://optimoz.mozdev.org/piemenus/[mozdev.org]

firebird...

[nasalicio]

something i have been wondering about a few days. i built a cvs copy on the 13th (my first copy of firebird). oddly enough (im using gentoo) the 0.5-r2 ebuild apparently built 0.6 even though it wasnt out at the time.

i have a two screenshots im curious about. the first screenshot shows moz.org saying 0.6 hasnt been released yet. the second screenshot shows freshmeat with the current date at the time.

still cant figure out if i was (building latest now) running 0.6 or a pre-0.6 with the 0.6 string already embedded in it.

Firebird Icon

[retromingent]

Here's an icon I just whipped up.

http://www.boston-express.com/firebird2a.png

Re:Firebird Icon

[Simon Lyngshede]

A bit strange but okay.

Some other guy has some pretty nice icons as well:
http://cheeaun.clook.net/phoenix/

They are made for Phoenix, but very well suited for Firebird as well. Looks like a bird on fire.

This should be standard in Firebird
user_pref("browser.enable_automatic_imag e_resizing ", false);

Image resizing is amazingly annoying, especially when using low-res monitors

Re:I'm at work, otherwise I'd find out for myself.

[pr0c]

Like Mozilla, Mozilla-Firebird has builds with XFT too. It does what your asking but by default XFT is not included and you may have to build it yourself. I'm using Mozilla-Firebird with XFT at the moment.

Where is This Registry Thingy?

[Mooncaller]

Should it be in /etc or /usr/etc? I've got an old SuSE 7.0 distro and can't find it. Some one please help. I want to see this bug. Oh you mean I need to put THAT on my system ... never mind!

PS Sorry could'nt help it.

Slooooow menus

[crivens]

For some reason it takes 5-10s to display the preferences window. When I change something like the fonts, it then take almost 20s for that window to close.

Phoenix does not come with Java

[WD]

Phoenix does not come with Java. I don't know what you mean by "java console", but you seem to be confused.

Re:Phoenix does not come with Java

[shione]

yea you're right. for some reason I kept reading javascript as java and I was thinking they made their own java runtime like in netscape 4.xx. my mistake.

Glibc 2.1 vs Glibc 2.2

[ahaning]

Can anyone here explain why Phoenix/Firebird builds have never been able to run without Glibc 2.2 whereas Mozilla runs quite well on Glibc 2.1?

For God's sake, it works on Windows 95 (I think) !

User Certificates

[zeugma-amp]

The one feature that Firebird is lacking that keeps me from using it as my primary browser is the lack of support for certificates. I have several websites that I support at work where I must use certificates because the websites are set up to both require user certs and perform checking of a CRL.

I can still use the full Mozilla for this as it has the ability to import certificates, but I've yet to be able to locate a method for doing this in Phoenix/Firebird.

If someone out there knows how it might be done, I'd appreciate either a reply here or a mail to [z e u g m a at p o b o x dot c o m]

A little tip.

[Dthoma]

I don't think this has been posted, but if you downloaded the Linux binary given in the FTP folder linked from the story and can't figure out what to run in the untarred folder, do './run-mozilla.sh ./MozillaFirebird'. Just one or the other on their own won't work. This confused me a bit at first trying to figure it out, but hopefully this will help someone.

Re:A little tip.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was able to double-click the MozillaFirebird icon directly from Konqueror and launch the app.

Re:mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the OP carefully. He couldn't find the pref in Mozilla and Netscape. He doesn't know about previous Firebird versions. This release of Firebird does what he expects out of the box.

The reply was slightly OT, but accurate. Firebird prefs are obviously in the Tools menu, but that's irrelevant here.

Firebird is by far the best browser out

[Mithrilhall]

Nothing competes with it...not even Opera!

Doesn't build :/

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, but it doesn't build:

other-licenses/libart_lgpl:
no rule to make target export

I know how to get the CVS version to build, but what about 0.6?

What is happenning to mozilla Composer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using Safari as my main browser for Mac OSX but keep Mozilla on mainly for the newsreader and Composer. Mozilla is also useful for some sites that Safari cannot handle (not many now, and they usually demand IE anyway).
Now that Mozilla is branching into seperate browser and email/news clients is Composer being dopped? It appears to be the only free WYSIWYG web editor around now that runs on OSX and although it is not that well featured it does for me and produces compliant code. Any news?
Hitone

Re:What is happenning to mozilla Composer?

[asa]

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

Re:What is happenning to mozilla Composer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to see that other people think this is worth maintaining. Will keep an eye on the development. Absolute positionong and better CSS support would be nice.
Thanks for the links: Hadn't seen any news on this before.
Hitone

Flash plugin sound problem

[warrior]

I know I'm not alone with this problem. The flash plugin (or mozilla) does a blocking wait whenever it loads a page that requests sound, so it freezes when I've got an mp3 playing. It's no fun having to stop your music every time some page decides to load flash content. I loathe flash, but unfortunately I sometimes need to view a page that has flash content. Is this a bug in mozilla or flash?

Cheers

Mike

Re:Flash plugin sound problem

[Joe Tie.]

What operating system are you using? I used to have that problem with flash in Linux. A new release of flash, about six months back, fixed the problem for me.

Well done

[Shogun SS]

I feel like a fool to have been using Internet Explorer all this time. Firebird is a pleasure to use. Mouse guestur's are very useful for quick navigation, the interface is very custumizable and displays everything you need while keeping maximum room for pages. I had often wondered why a tab system was never used in IE, it just makes so much sense, no more looking through a cluster on the task bar for a certain page. Im very pleased with this browser.

Kudos to the Mozilla project

[Petronius]

I'm glad to see that the community is fighting back at M$. Now, I have 3 great browsers that I can use on Linux: Mozilla (my 'reference implementation' when testing web apps), Galeon & Firebird. I remember testing Phoenix 0.3 and it looked great then, then switching over to Galeon. I think I'm going to switch to Firebird now. The UI is so clean and fast. What a pleasure! Excellent work. Keep it up!

Uhm, Is There Something Here Opera Doesn't Do?

[Master of Transhuman]

Read the "why you should use" piece. Far as I can tell, Opera does all that (except for the space problem - and Opera allows full screen views but I rarely use that).

I didn't hear anybody say that Firebird is actually faster than Opera at displaying Web pages...

Is Firebird actually better at displaying IE-specific pages with stupid JavaScript and DOM stuff?

If it can't show pages faster or handle non-standard crap better than Opera, why should I switch?

Re:Uhm, Is There Something Here Opera Doesn't Do?

[dpete4552]

I happen to find Firebird a lot less combersome than Opera. But if you don't see any reasons to switch, then dont.

Re:Uhm, Is There Something Here Opera Doesn't Do?

[swordgeek]

My first response is "Bah!"

My second response is that I wish you Opera zealots would quit your blathering! (Although I mean that in the nicest possible way.)

Seriously, I looked at Opera some time (before the IE5.0 release date) ago, and it seemed like a fine browser. I like the layout of Mozilla better. I don't go stomping onto every release note for Opera, talking about why Mozilla is better. (Although Mozilla is free--Opera is still adware)

I like Mozilla. You like Opera. This is NOT a problem! If you don't like Mozilla (Firebird, whatever), then don't use it! If you've paid for Opera or it suits your purposes better, or just makes you happier, then FINE! I'm not trying to find the One True Browser and destroy all of the others. Different products for different people is indirect competition, and is a good thing, dammit!

Re:Uhm, Is There Something Here Opera Doesn't Do?

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, Icould point out that the article in question had to do with "why one should switch to Mozilla"... My point was exactly yours - if Opera does everything Mozilla does, why should I switch?

Amazing how often Slashdot posters forget the original article in the back and forth of posting.

A few gripes:

[ubernostrum]

• The size. Sure, the tarball isn't that big, but when I unpack it on my Linux system it eats up almost 30M of space. That's ridiculous for the supposedly "lighter" Mozilla browser.
• I can't remove the Bookmarks Toolbar folder from my bookmarks. I don't use this feature and don't want that folder cluttering up my bookmarks.
• While I'm talking about bookmarks, the bookmark editor is still a little flaky. For the longest time, the nightly builds wouldn't let me add or impott bookmarks at all; with 0.6, I couldn't import my bookmarks.html the first time I popped open the bookmark editor, but it worked the second time. What's up with that?
• UI responsiveness: the prefs window is way too slow to load, especially the fonts panel.
• Galeon has a "close" widget on every tab. That's an incredibly useful thing.

For now, I'll stick with Galeon. Firebird has promise, though, and when it gets closer to 1.0 I'll check it out again.

Re:A few gripes:

[Anonymous Coward]

The size. Sure, the tarball isn't that big, but when I unpack it on my Linux system it eats up almost 30M of space.

Oh my god, it just ate 0.075% of the disk of an entry-level eMachine! My heavens, how horrible!

Now, a download size of 30 megs is bad, sure. A in-RAM size of 30 megs would make it a resource hog on an older or low-end machine. But an on-disk size of 30 megs is utterly trivial.

Re:A few gripes:

[ubernostrum]

30M is far from trivial, especially for a "lightweight" browser. I've used complete operating systems that didn't eat 30M of hard drive; why should a Web browser get away with it?

Also, on a low-end or older machine, 30M can be a significant space investment. I've got Linux boxes with drives in the hundreds of megabyes range; 30M ain't so trivial on one of those.

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Database does to BBS.
Browser does to Database.

Karma is Karma to all.

oops

[nsebban]

[...] About a zillion people wrote to announce Mozilla 0.6, but asa was the first [...]

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* ?

Ok, he will probably get a bigger cock and a good mortgage, but anyway...hmmm...forget it :)

Re:oops

[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

Mouse gestures

[200_success]

Check out Optimoz. It's very easy to install an XPI add-on to Mozilla or Phoenix (Mozilla Firebird) to provide mouse gestures or pie menus.

Pie menus are like mouse gestures, but pie menus are better because the user gets visual feedback, which helps the learning process.

Want the old prefs back?

[Drakonian]

You can get to them by copying chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref.xul into your address bar. (There is no default handler for chrome URLs so clicking it won't work)

Wow, this version feels fast. I've never felt that in all the Phoenix's or Mozilla's or even a nightly from a couple weeks ago, but this 0.6 screams!

Google bar problems?

[Drakonian]

Anyone having problems with the Google bar(Ctrl - K)? Mine seems to only search text on the current page. (Like type ahead fine with a /)

Re:Google bar problems?

[wossName]

Click on the icon (in the search bar).

Re:Google bar problems?

[Drakonian]

Hehe, now I feel stupid. Thanks. (Note: That was a bad UI design. There is no indication that icon is selectable)

Unofficial Xft2+GTK2 Debian package

[darketernal]

Just to let you all know that I have built Firebird 0.6-release into an unofficial Debian package that can be found here:

http://pryan.org/phoenix/joshk/dist/firebird_0.6 -1 _i386.deb

Please send any feedback to the email this username's bound to :)

Advice on Email clients for windows

[TheNumberSix]

suggestions for best non-outlook email program?

I like Vivian Mail which is a very lightweight email client that is very simple and straighforward to use. The only downside is that the English version's translation is a little spotty.

I now use Calypso which has one of the best email features I had ever found. I use my popmail client at home and sometimes I use webmail from the same account at school. I sometimes want to leave messages on the server so I can get the message later from webmail and sometimes I want to delete them from the server right away. Calypso has a context menu that allows "Delete from mail server now" or "Mark to Delete from Mail Server at next connection". I use that feature constantly and now I find it necessary in any other client I try.

status vs. Mozilla???

[swordgeek]

OK, Firebird 0.6 and Mozilla 1.3. Given that I'm only interested in the browser and also that Mozilla is my day-to-day browser, how far along (ahead, behind?) is Firebird vs. Mozilla? At which point should I switch over?

Re:status vs. Mozilla???

[Queuetue]

Around three months ago.

Re:status vs. Mozilla???

[megabyte405]

Queuetue has it right ("three months ago") but I won't hold it against you. Switch. Now. You'll thank yourself. (I use Windows, and now never touch IE or Mozilla regular. When I use Linux Moz-Firebird/Phoenix is my first addition to my installation.) Posting in .5, while downloading .6!

Wonderful!(But please lose the drag bar Win icon)

[ishmalius]

I have been using Mozilla since it was first available, and I must say that this version is so nice and small and fast. I have no complaints at all.

HOWEVER, it just seems almost criminal that such a pretty piece of Open Source coding must be marred by the evil little Windows icon on the drag bar. A tiny bird or a little Zilla would be more in keeping with the spirit of the thing.

That is the only thing that bugs me. Everything else is wonderful.

XPFE.

[mcbridematt]

At the moment I use Firebird only on my Linux box. I simply cannot stand not using XPFE/SeaMonkey.

I might as well maintain the XPFE browser myself..

Whoops... better get back to some hacking on myself

Cool!

[jefu]

Most excellent!

Now if I only had mod points and hadn't already posted in this topic and.... I'd mod that up about seven times.

Firebird *would* be nice

[whitroth]

Except that it seems to be Too Difficult to manage even a configuration line of "external.protocol.handler.mailto "kmail %u""

Until they fix it, or give me *some* kind of useable workaround other than cut-and-paste to open a mailto, I consider it fast, neat...and useless. Certainly, I don't even suggest it to anyone I know. They would scream and throw things...and not listen to my suggestions again.

Score: d- for not having something so obvious.

mark

Re:WHAT ABOUT BANNERBLIND! ARG!

[joshwa]

AdBlock extension.

Not all pointing devices have a middle button

[yerricde]

If you want to close a tab just click on it with the middle mouse button.

That would require me to attach an external mouse or trackball to my laptop computer, whose touchpad does not have a Middle Button(TM).

NTLM?

[yerricde]

Mozilla has 99% of the features most people want either by default or through extensions

Is there an extension for NTLM authentication on a desktop platform other than Windows? Mozilla 1.4a for Windows has NTLM, but AFAIK it just tunnels through Windows's own NTLM support and won't work on BSD (FreeBSD, Mac OS X) or GNU (Mandrake, Debian) systems.

New web browser?

[Ctrl-Z]

I'm not exactly clamoring for a new web browser, but it looks worth checking out.

New web browser? Where have you been for the last year? If you haven't been using this as your primary browser, my only question is why not?

inline find

[Kircle]

Mozilla/Firebird's type ahead is better (much better imo) usability-wise than Opera's inline find.

Mozilla: Search text links by simply typing. Search any text by pressing "/" then typing.

Opera: Can't limit search to text links. Search any text by pressing ctrl-f then typing.

No crashes here.

[gottabeme]

I saw that too, but I've been using Firebird for several weeks now, and I've only had one crash. What caused it I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was not any auto-complete stuff, because I wasn't using it at the time. In fact, in the past week I've started using auto-complete more, and it's worked just fine.

Maybe the bugs exist, but they seem to pop up extremely rarely.

Released?

[riceboy50]

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?

piling on :)

[timothy]

Asa:

I also really like the drop-down-to-google (or other selected search engine) that I get in Mozilla. The search bar might be cool in addition, but being able to search google with the down arrow is something I'll miss if I switch to Firebird. Perhaps it could be implemented as an option?

OTOH I should one of these days bother to set up a bunch of helpful keywords ...

timothy

Great Work? POS!

[Rick the Red]

I'm sorry, but I've just finished a weekend with Firebird, and it's got worse memory leaks than Phoenix (on Windows ME -- YMMV). With Phoenix I would lose resources and memory and crash if too many windows open. With Firebird this happens if too many tabs open. I'm seriously looking at Opera, even though it costs $$. Hell, Mozaic was better than this!