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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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

[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

[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:FreeBSD

[AmunRa]

Use the source Luke!

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.

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

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.

The Win32 binary is a 6.66 MB Download

[Gruturo]

6.66

Man. that's evil! :-)

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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"

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* :)

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.

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.

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.

Coming Soon!

[Sebastopol]

Mozilla Trans Am and Mozilla IROC-Z !!!

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