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Mozilla Firebird gets .8 Release, and New Name
Yage writes "Firebird, the lightweight version of Mozilla gets release 0.8 and changes its name again (remember Phoenix?) to avoid confusion with another OSS project. The new name is Firefox. There's a press release out about the name change and new version. And, as usual, download it from
mozilla.org." Worth noting that ThunderBird .5 has been released as well. Update: 02/09 14:55 GMT by H : Thanks to Steve Garrity for pointing out the name change FAQ.
A FAQ about the name change can be found here.
There's also a thread on the mozillazine forums about the name change here
Be sure to set your theme to default --
i lost my scrollbars and some buttons when i used
the "Orbit Green" theme.
otherwise the aa'ed fonts look great under linux and copy/paste seems is improved.
-greg
Word Mark:FIREFOX
Goods and Services:
IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Browsers, namely, software for browsing and interacting with data on the global computer network and secure private networks, and software programs to connect computers to the global computer network and to secure private networks
Owner(APPLICANT):
Mozilla Foundation NON-PROFIT CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 1350 Villa Street, Suite C Mountain View CALIFORNIA 940411126
Filing Date:
December 22, 2003
Information found with a search on uspto.gov
Ben Goodger made a blog entry where he explained the entire rationale behind the name change to Firefox: http://www.bengoodger.com/weblog/archives/cat_mozb log.shtml
Some of the MozillaZine forum members share the dismay of earlier posters over how this may damage evangelism efforts, because of the effort required in explaining the similarities and differences between Firebird and Firefox. Either way, because Firebird is beta software, these types of name changes can happen with minimal disruption. Imagine what would have happened if this was Firefox 1.0, not Firefox 0.8.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
As stated in the press release, "[t]o avoid overlap with another open source project". That would be the Firebird database.
This is because the authors of the themes have not updated their themes to support Firefox 0.8. In between Firebird 0.7 and Firefox 0.8 there were several changes made to the internal APIs which broke many themes. Because the theme authors do not want to waste time on a moving target, they collectively decided to wait until Firefox 0.8 was released. As a result, you will either have to wait for your theme to be updated or bug the theme author to fix their theme.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
A new download manager.
Bugfixes.
Improvements in tabbed browsing.
Bugfixes.
A new Help dialog.
More bugfixes.
Changes in the Gecko rendering engine.
Even more bugfixes.
Seriously, I'd upgrade.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Well I'm not sure about official but you can see what fraction of Google hits come from each browser at the Google Zeitgeist. For some reason they don't have browser figures in there year end summary so for the moment the latest figures are for November. The numbers for gecko based engines are depressing.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
- It has to be easy to remember
- It has to be easy to pronounce
- It has to be easy to spell
- It can't sound like something nasty
- It can't mean something nasty in some other language
- Should actually remind people of something pleasant
Buikoler:- To many syllables to remember easily
- Not pronouncable
- Hard to spell. There could be multiple spellings. Even worse, there would be easier ways to spell it and have it sound the same.
- Sounds too much like "buccaneer", "bukkake", or even "butt"
A good name is chosen through a brainstorming and making sure that everything coming out meets these criteria. An example of a good name that was chosen this way would be "Expedia" (the travel company):A Torrent seeing as they've been slashdotted, which I supposed is a Good Thing for them.
FireFox lacks the wonderful Mozilla ability to simply type text into the URL bar, hit the up key and then enter, and run a Google search. I find the separate Google search field an annoying complication of Mozilla's search ability.
Actually, typing directly into the Address bar does an I'm feelin lucky -search, which I've found darn convenient. Granted, the search box uses space, but usually so little it's not a problem. The ability to add alternate searches to the search box is great as well.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd still say the Firefox aproach has it's benefits.
.: Max Romantschuk
The migration of mozilla settings is scheduled for 0.9. Remember, in spite of appearances, Fire(bird|fox) is still beta software, and it's not feature complete. The plan is to make 0.9 feature complete and then work on polish in the run up to 1.0.
I'd agree that the mozilla search functionality is easier for advanced users than the corresponding functionality in Firefox. However, the FF functionality is more obvious to less advanced users and more consistent with the behaviour of other programs. Personally, I find that Custom Keywords make for a better search interface than Seamonkey or Firefox. In fact I believe that FF now comes with some custom keywords built in - although you've probably just deleted those by overwriting the bookmarks. See How Cool are Custom Keywords for more information.
Now that a brand name has finally settled, get the Firefox ad campaign buttons! Stick em on your website!
. ht ml
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/buttons
For those look for a torrent to download the windows version, there is one here
the .zip will be up within the week according to ben goodger (one of the main developer guys)
there's an unoffical build (based on the installer build) here
about:config
:)
Find "turbo"
enable it
So now there's a button campaign! Back in the day, we had Netscape Now!, then there was a MSIE Now!, and then there was a loooong silence. Way too long. Way way WAY too long.
Party like it's 1996!
In case you still have that personal homepage thing gathering dust in some corner of the web, or a blog that you think no one reads but several people actually do - DO the button thing! RELIVE the nostalgy! HEAR the whining from standards-brandishing people (who, gritting their teeth, will admit Firefox supports W3C standards well, unlike that other browser)!
I'll try that page as soon as the mozilla site isn't completely slashdotted. I had to make my own stupid "Mozilla Now" button several months ago, glad Mozilla folks have finally done them themselves =)
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5
Release Notes
Mozilla Thunderbird is a redesign of the integrated Mozilla App-Suite mail component. Our goal is to leverage much of the existing functionality of that product to produce a stand-alone mail application that is simple and extensible. The Thunderbird Mail Product page has more information.
Owing to the maturity of the foundational code of the app-suite, Thunderbird is very usable; however, it is considered a Preview Release, and as such is assumed to have defects. To help find the defects, the developers happily receive user feedback (via comments in the Mozilla Thunderbird Support forum kindly hosted by MozillaZine, or via bugs filed in Bugzilla.) Please carefully read these release notes before filing any bugs in Bugzilla.
The focus of this fifth milestone release was on stability and bug fixing. This milestone is based on the recently released Mozilla 1.6 Application suite. Read the Thunderbird Roadmap about the goals of this release. While there is much more work yet to do, the developers are excited about recent progress and are anxious to share their latest efforts with the community. Enjoy!
This document covers the following topics for the Thunderbird 0.5 milestone release:
What's New
Here are the highlights for this Thunderbird release:
* New Features
We now support the notion of multiple identities per mail account. This makes it easy to have several email addresses which end up going into the same account. Read More about how to hook this up.
Thunderbird 0.5 includes Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for POP3 and SMTP.
Option to turn on the Mozilla 1.x style folder columns in Thunderbird (Tools / Options / Advanced / General Settings).
A new Palm Sync Address book conduit is now available for 0.5. You can now do a one way sync, PC -> Palm or Palm -> PC, by changing the hot sync conduit setup. We now prevent duplicate cards in Thunderbird address books when syncing with Palm categories. Numerous improvements with the initial sync.
A new, improved version of the offline extension is now available for 0.5. Please read the installation notes in this document about how to first uninstall old extensions.
Improved Spell Checker including a new US dictionary.
Ability to paste names or addresses from a spreadsheet directly into the addressing widget of a new compose window.
Improved profile migration from Netscape 4.x.
* Recently Fixed Bugs
If a new message arrives while you are reading a message, we no longer scroll the message body back to the top.
When saving an IMAP attachment, we no longer re-download the attachment from the server.
Saving an attachment now brings up a standalone progress window.
Copying a message to a Sent Folder now shows progress in the progress window.
When saving or opening an attachment, the progress dialog now reports accurate progress information.
We now mark IMAP messages read in a folder if they are deleted or moved to another folder. This fixes incorrect unread counts when checking folders other than the Inbox for new messages.
LDAP searches now honor the directory search filter property.
Ability to paste a single cell of data from Microsoft Excel into the compose window body.
Problems with IMAP folders three levels deep not showing up when you are not using the IMAP subscription model.
Tools / Options / Attachments / Attachment Folder setting is now remembered.
Linux builds no longer crash when viewing HTML messages requiring a JAVA plugin.
Improved handling of apple double encoded attachments from OSX clients.
No more
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
A few mirrors that aren't (yet) saturated... http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/ftp.mozilla.org/ pub/firefox/
ftp://mozilla.mirror.pacific.net.au/mozilla/firefo x/
ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/mirror /ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer
They've been rewriting the SVG backend.
This was marked as fixed on Feb 7, so now they're probably working on getting more of the bugs it blocked fixed. Once they major ones (there's at least 2 that caused crashes) are fixed, it should start showing up in nightly trunk builds.
End of line..
We updated our mozilla.org mirror this morning in anticipation of a slashdotting.
http://www.sunsite.org.uk/package/mozilla.
Hmm, I'll have to update our summary...
Mozilla Firefox 0.8 Review
.php?id=1825 (try to click on the details link in the middle where they rate the anime, note the website seems down at the moment). MBNA payment page won't work anymore.. ect. Little things like this.
Some of the best things I like about Mozilla Firefox 0.8:
1. Two words - Bookmark Management
Wow! I was able to modify/delete/rename/move 450 bookmarks in a few short hours. It was a combination of being able to edit bookmarks off the menu bar easily and opening a whole folder of websites in seconds. It makes Internet Explorer's 'Organize Favorites' look like a sick joke. Actually it is and I consider it one of the very weak things about Internet Explorer (lets call it IE for short). I simply cannot check all 450 bookmarks to see if the website still exists while using IE. With Mozilla Firefox, it only took like a half hour to get that part done. Tabbed browsing works. Big time. I used to use Tabbrowser Extensions to add some additional tweaks but found it hindered things more than helped. I'll mention what those are in my what I dislike about Mozilla Firefox section.
2. It doesn't crash
Oh Mozilla Firefox can still crash if there's bad code written for a web page, make no mistake about that. Still, it's very very rare and it's so much more stable than any Mozilla 1.x Application Suite release. Perhaps its because I have more confidence in Mozilla Firefox than with the Mozilla Application Suite (call it App. Suite for short), due to some previously bad experiences doing real web development with Composer with the 1.5 release. However, this whole crash issue is more of a release-by-release kind of thing. It's my hope that the Mozilla development team continues to focus on making Mozilla Firefox as crash proof as possible. Keep up the good work!
3. Mozilla Firefox loads up fast
It is way faster than the App. Suite due to it not preloading several applications I don't use at all. I have no confidence in using Mozilla Mail, nor do I use an email account with POP access. I've tried Composer and it crashed on a regular basis that it was a totally useless program. I also have no clue on how to use ChatZilla, and I keep my small address book in a text file. So my main focus has always been on how well the Mozilla web browser was. Now with Mozilla Firefox I have a web browser that loads almost as fast as IE and to me it's important that it loads fast because it greatly hindered me from switching over for good.
4. Properly displayed webpages
There's always going to be one minor annoyance per website since it was built with IE in mind, but all in all, Mozilla developer team finally nailed it. It's good enough for most webpages and when I can't view a webpage properly in Mozilla Firefox , I switch over to IE quickly. There's an extension called 'IE View' that adds a right-click menu option that'll open IE for whatever webpage you are currently on at the moment. Very handy feature and its something I use every now and then. Certain webpages that just don't work well include any Microsoft/MSN website, pages like this http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime
5. Options dialogue box
This was one of the things I always thought were desperately needed for a Mozilla web browser. The Application Suite way only shows a directory name (which is sometimes truncated), and you have to double click to see more directories underneath it in order to get to the specific preferences you wanted to change. First of all, you can't at a quick glance get to the section you want right away. There needed to be a visual aid to help guide you to the section you wanted. I always thought the most *ideal* way was a combination of icons and a word or two to describe the general section of preferences. I couldn't believe what I was seeing with the first release of Mozilla Firefox that I tested. Icons plus a short word or two that's not truncated plus I didn't need to do anymo
AFAIK it's still planned to name version 1.0 of Firefox "Mozilla Browser". Thunderbird will become "Mozilla Mail".