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."

Comments

Re:Serious Question

[agent dero]

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

Re:Serious Question

[bat'ka makhno]

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.

Re:Firebird vs. Camino

[MinutiaeMan]

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.

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 /. here, I'm probably preaching to the choir now...)

Yes!

[michaelggreer]

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.

Re:Yes!

[ahector]

Not exactly. I mean, you are right that the theme makes Firebird (and Mozilla, for a while now) look like aqua, but it's not actually using real OS X widgets. Get a copy of Moz or Firebird for Windows and you can do the Pinstripe theme as well; it doesn't rely on carbon or cocoa for ui elements. Good, I say, that the Pinstripe theme helps the browser fit in better-- it's just not the same, exactly, as other OS X apps. Even though I'm nitpicking here, it's kind of useful and interesting info. Right?

Re:Serious Question - advatages

[Ster]

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

Re:True, but its not quite that bad

[bengoodger]

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.