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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.
I can overlook their game of musical names; the browser is just phenomenal. I seldom even go to IE anymore, and when I do have to, I blame the guy who coded the site, not Firebird -- I mean Firefox.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
...it's surprising they didn't name it "Starfox".
(Apologies to Eli. :)
Join Tor today!
Stop playing name games. That's the sort of thing that can really hurt adoption.
TODO: Something witty here...
A FAQ about the name change can be found here.
There's also a thread on the mozillazine forums about the name change here
The good things about the name:
I've said this in the past, and I will say it again. If you are naming your open source software, make it something unique. Why would you want to compete for search terms with all these other people, products, corporations, and organizations. If your product has merit, then people will recognize the name that you give it and you will get brand loyalty. There is no need show your similarity to other products or your system requirements in your name.
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
You know, I wish they would stop changing their name. I use Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my sole browser and absolutely enjoy it. The problem is, I am trying to get my family to use it as well, but trying to keep them straight on what it is called is getting a little ridiculous.
Conversation with family: "You know that browser I gave you a link on...No, not Mozilla. Yeah, it was Firebird. No now its called Firefox. I don't know why, just use it"
Sig it.
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
As stated in the press release, "[t]o avoid overlap with another open source project". That would be the Firebird database.
Does this mean that Firefox will have thought-controlled anti-spam and popup suppression?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Though I have to admit, for my typical browsing experience I don't see a whole lot of difference between Firebird's latest 0.7 release and Firefox. I'll explore the new tweaks and nifties sooner or later, I suppose.
Now, somebody tell me at what point the name's going to change again and I can run Firefly 0.9 as my browser of choice? That would be sweet, the icon could be a tiny image of the Serenity...for the current icon, has anyone else wondered if that fox is having a little too much fun with the globe?
But I digress. I'm looking forward to the 1.0 release, whatever the name ends up being. I'd be interested in knowing what the official marketshare (as far as these things can be determined) is for Fire-[$animal_name]/Mozilla browsers. I know that I've had more stability/popup-blocking goodness out of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox than I usually get out of IE, and far fewer crashes (Firebird crashed on me once on my XP Pro box. Once in how many months? Let's not even think about IE's crash frequency...)
Stupid quote of the day: "That browser sucks...it doesn't even support VBScript!"
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
Firefox 0.8 Our next generation browser is lightning fast in every way. Unless you're trying to download it right now.
(this is on XP): I open up FireFox and have no bookmarks, even though I have hundreds in Mozilla. Oh, I mean I don't have none. I have some basic ones they give you to start with. And my imported IE bookmarks, of which there are none, because I don't use IE. But no Mozilla bookmarks.
So I close Firebird, go into my Mozilla profile, copy the "bookmarks.html" file from it to the FireFox profile(still in a folder called "Phoenix"), and bam, there's all my bookmarks. Why the damn browser can't do that for me is beyond comprehension.
Same with all my preferences. No option to inherit these things from Mozilla.
Overall it is quite a nice browser, and I'd recommend it to people whose computers are too slow/low on memory for the real thing. I still prefer Mozilla, mainly because I think the Modern theme looks better than FireFox's default, because I can't see an easy way to keep FireFox in memory like I do with Mozilla, and because 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.
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
Worth noting that ThunderBird .5 has been released as well.
Don't you mean ThunderFox?
-Colin
I do not like the new name. May I suggest the name "FireChick" in reference to a "smaller" bird?
I can see it now - Mitchell Gates (Clint Eastwood), elite Microsoft coder and flashback-impaired veteran of the Browser Wars, is sent behind enemy lines to steal the only production prototype of the Firefox, with its revolutionary thought-controlled toolbar technology ("but remember, Mr Gates, you have to _think in XML_!"). The film ends rather abruptly when someone tells him he can download it for free.
MozBird, MozFox MozCam sound good too me.
;)
Thank you, because of your horrible suggestions I now feel less irksome about the name "Firefox"
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
A Torrent seeing as they've been slashdotted, which I supposed is a Good Thing for them.
Why can't they figure out these names are all dumb and poor for brand recognition.
Actually, I think the Mozilla project has done much better PR than most of the other large, open source projects. The project always comes across as much better organized than most of the other projects I follow. I think the name change was a smart move.
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
Is Mozilla Lite just too obvious for them?!
Apparently. Rumour has it the next release will be called "iMozilla-NG Xtreme" - something for everyone, I guess.
AAAAGHHH. It's spelt light, lite is the creation of some semi literate PR bunny and we hates it, we hates it. Don't we Precious?
For those look for a torrent to download the windows version, there is one here
Yeah, but some Mac users generally refer to it as "Mail dot app" or "Mail-app", because it's good to have a distinction.
"Do you use Mail?" "Yeah, I get mail all the time." "No no, do you use Mail?" "Well, if I get it, then I must use it, right?" "No, I mean do you use Apple's-OS-X-Mail-Application?" "Oh! Well, yeah." -- I've had this type of conversation more than once over the years.
Sometimes I wish Apple had come up with some different name for their client -- after all, they came up with the colorful name "Safari" for their web browser...
> Wait for it...
>
>Internet Navigator
Seriously, since at this point the whole naming scheme is fscked anyway, I wonder why they couldn't go back to the old netscape naming conventions:
Mozilla Navigator (browser only)
Mozilla Communicator (including Mozilla Mail, etc.)
Heck, even my family and/or co-workers would be able to know what is going on then, as this would build upon what we finally got them trained on years ago.
when they change the name with every release?
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
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..
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