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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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
6.66
:-)
Man. that's evil!
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
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.
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
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* :)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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 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.
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.
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.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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.