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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.
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
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
(One more thing I wish they would fix, however, and that is links that open in a new window.[...])
// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):d ow", true);
You can fix it by yourself:
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_win
Check this page for more interesting tweaks.
:wq
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 ;)
z illa-source.tar.bz2 :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot checkout mozilla/browser mozilla/toolkit
.mozconfig .mozconfig contains
/opt/firebird: /opt/firebird /opt/firebird/MozillaFirebird
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/mo
tar -xjf mozilla-source.tar.bz2
cvs -d
Now we are ready to choose build options.
cd mozilla
vi
here is what my
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
cp -r -L dist/bin/
(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
I don't know if this is exactly the official way to do it but that's how I did it.
Good luck
The Mozilla browser is based on XUL. So is Firebird.
I've tried:
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.
Mind the gap...
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:
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.
Edit -> Preferences -> Tabbed Browsing -> Load links in the background
:)
should do the trick
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
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.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
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/
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.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Clever signature text goes here.
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:
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!
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.
:-) 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.
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
(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
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
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
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!
Random is the New Order.