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Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1 Released For Mac OS X
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1 has been released for Mac OS X only. The release - coming just over a week since the last one - fixes a number of bugs that made 0.7 frankly unusable on Macs. There's more info in the release notes. All MacBeards should upgrade immediately."
One of the reasons I use Firebird and Mozilla on MacOS X, is because of Safari's quirky Java support, some applets just don't work, while others crash the browser.
Something that Mozilla & Firebird have pretty good, java support
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That's interesting, the one complaint I have about Mozilla on MacOS X is lack of support for Java 1.4.1 applets. Mozilla is stuck using the 1.3.1 default, even if 1.4.1 is available on the machine. That bug's been open for months now, still without resolution. Safari supports 1.4.1, but, as the parent says, it is quite quirky. As an example, Hushmail doesn't work with either Mozilla's 1.3.1 or Safari's 1.4.1.
Maybe it's not an issue in Panther anymore. I'll check once I get it.
I Just tried 0.7.1 and it is definitely faster for the sites I go to. It's especially faster for SSL sites (that's a big Safari complaint I have - SSL is s...l...o...w; Ive whined about it before on /.).
I use Firebird/Mozilla on WinXP/2K/2K3, Linux, BSD and Solaris and would love to see Camino base itself off of the Firebird fork and make it more Mac-like, but, until Safari get's an SLL clue, I'll take the fast rendering, good SSL performance and standards' compliance that seem to be there with 0.7.1.
One other thing it has over Safari is the ability to *not* wait for the whole stupid page to load before continuing. It's not a problem on all sites, but it happens more oft than not, again, especially on SSL sites.
Lastly, the best thing about it is that it doesn't use the brushed metal theme (it was nice for a while, but it really grates on ya over time).
I still don't know why Apple threw the KHTML folks the bone when they should have supported Mozilla.
Mind the gap...
I used to use Camino as my primary browser until shortly after Safari 1.0 came out, but I have also been keeping my eye on Firebird simply for its cross-platform capabilities.
/. here, I'm probably preaching to the choir now...)
In my experience, there is very little difference in any of the browsers out there for Mac OS X, aside from various UI and preferences differences. But specifically for Firebird versus Camino, I think the only thing that Camino has over Firebird is the snazzier Aqua UI. Firebird is still butt-ugly -- not that that's a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because I'm just a vain Mac user. (I do of course pity those who don't realize that you CAN choose "pretty" -- or to put it nicely, "aesthetically pleasing" -- appearances for my apps. But since I'm on the Apple part of
Actually, the Pinstripe theme has achieved this for some time for Mozilla, and evidently will be standard from the next release on in Firebird. I care for native controls too, and we have 'em in Firebird.
KHTML was chosen over Mozilla because it was smaller, which means it was easier for them to learn, extend, and test. Look back at the press releases and articles from back in January 2003, when the Safari beta was released; they go into their reasoning for choosing one KHTML over Mozilla.
-Ster
OS X apps can use Aqua or brushed metal (or their own nonstandard GUI, of course). This is a choice made by the developer, but apps can be tweaked by users with either a third-party app called Metallifizer, or with the developer tools. I personally can't stand the brushed metal, but some people seem to like it.
:(
Oh, and just a note, a lot of Apple's apps are nonstandard brushed metal (iTunes, the Finder in 10.3). This means that you need a lot of workarounds to change them to Aqua.
That's correct. If you work around the site's OS check and install the theme on windows you'll get the Aquafied icons but not the actual pin stripes, UI controls (buttons, scrollbars etc)... they'll look like Windows controls to an extent since the Windows implementation of the theme renderer is doing the drawing.
FWIW - many apps on MacOS use highly customized widget sets that are not part of the collection of "stock" widgets provided by the OS, including Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Internet Explorer and even Safari. These "owner draw" widgets are effectively the same concept as Firebird with its native theme renderer + XUL. The deal with Firebird is that because it's in its pre-1.0 state on MacOS X not all of the rendering glitches have been corrected.
- Camino: no way through the GUI to disable image animation; relatively little information about cookies if you ask for cookie prompts.
- IE: bloody ancient. No tabs. Poor cookie control. No way to disable image animation.
- Safari: no way to disable image animation. Poor cookie control. Metal interface (although that's fairly easy to fix).
- Mozilla/Firebird: Proxies aren't linked to the Mac OS network preferences. (You'd be amazed at how annoying that is when you're shuffling a laptop between work and home...) Non-native widgets (minor irk from my point of view).
If somebody could change Firebird to link proxies to the network preferences, it'd be ideal -- I'd live with the non-native widgets quite happily. Or a cookie manager for Safari..." I want to save a webpage, I switch over to Mozilla because Safari does not save any image, css, etc files when saving a webpage (only html)."
Just a quick idea, print to PDF. Would be OK for archiving webpages...
One other thing it has over Safari is the ability to *not* wait for the whole stupid page to load before continuing.
I was testing out some progress-bar code and I've discovered that Safari has a 16k buffer. It will wait until the buffer is full, then draw, then fill the buffer again.
So in order to make my progress bar update on safari, I'd have to send 16k worth of spaces every time the bar moves.
In comparison, IE and Mozilla will draw the page as soon as it receives a closing body tag.