Mozilla Firebird

Mozilla Firefox is a fast, light and tidy open source web browser. At its public launch in 2004 Mozilla Firefox was the first browser to challenge Microsoft Internet Explorer’s dominance. Boasting many features such as Spam mail filters, RSS Feeds, HTML support, multiple identities, and robust Web mail, POP, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange server support. Mozilla Thunderbird is also a great addition to the popular browser Firefox.

Mozilla Firebird

Mozilla's new www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/(link dead, sorry)Firebird browser isavailable for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I downloaded andinstalled both the Mac OS X and Windows versions. At this time (August 2003) this is still at a pre-release version 0.6.1, but inmy testing, there's no reason not to use it as your default browsernow. The release notes do warn that the Mac OS X version is stillquite rough, but I really didn't notice that to be the case atall.

You might also download Thunderbird, which is the companion mailand newsreader. I'll save Thunderbird for a separate review.

Firebird includes a nicely done popup blocker, tabbed browsing,and the typical things you expect from any browser like bookmarkmanagement, etc. The major emphasis of Firebird is speed andsimplicity, but there is also a large list of texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html(link dead, sorry)extensionsthat can be added for additional features.

Some of the things that I dislike about Safari on Mac OS X aremore to my liking in Firebird. XML documents such as rss feeds aredisplayed in the same manner as Internet Explorer would show them,and FTP sites are shown within the browser (as opposed to Safari'sannoying hand-off to Finder). However, Mozilla Firebird (eitherplatform) fails miserably when presented with a large XML page likehttps://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml.It may eventually load, but I doubt you'll have the patience towait for it. Internet Explorer (even the older Mac version) handlesthat easily. Keep in mind that this is a pre-release version; minorflaws like this will be fixed soon, I'm sure.

There's a web site I know that rather stupidly loads a movie asits first page. Firebird handled that quickly and withoutcomplaint, so its problems with large XML probably aren't relatedto memory handling. Upgrade to mac os 10.14.

I added the RSS panel extension to both the Mac and Windowsversions. It was quite pleasant not to see 'Windows version only'warnings at the extension site, and the RSS reader performedidentically on both platforms.

The Mac Preferences and windows Options panels look identical.Advanced configuration options can be controlled by typing'about:config' in the browser.

The Search box can be changed with a click to search this page,dmoz.org, or Google. You can even add other choices to it fromhttps://mycroft.mozdev.org/. Theregular location bar does a Google 'I'm feeling lucky' search onwhatever you type in that isn't a web page. Type in 'SCO Unixsupport' and you'll probably land here at aplawrence.com.

The Location bar has other tricks too: type 'dict ' or 'webster' followed by any word you want to look up in a dictionary. You caneven add your own keywords: https://www.mozillanews.org/index.php3?article=55.Any bookmark can have a keyword that calls it up, optionallypassing the word to the link. Just right click (Mac control click)on any bookmark in the Sidebar and choose properties.

I happened to notice something new to me about Mozilla browserswhen saving a web page. Usually browsers just save whatever the webpage has in it. So if the IMG SRC= points to a relative link, thenwhen the page is on your computer your browser will look for theimage relative to where the file is. Software to make bootable usb mac. But if it is an absolute:https://www.wherever.com/image.gif, then it will look to there andin all probabilty the image will display.

But Mozilla does it differently. Mozilla Firebird and otherMozilla browsers will create a directory for images and will changereferences in the saved file to point there. If your page is savedas ~/fred, Mozilla creates ~/fred_files. It's more than justimages, too: if the page has javascript, it puts functions in theretoo. In other words, it really goes out of its way to save thewhole darn kit and kaboodle. Of course it offers you options toonly save the html if that's your desire.

If Firebird is this good now, imagine how nice it will be whenfinished. Give it a try, I think you'll like it.

Got something to add? Macos catalina could not be installed. Send me email.

Mozilla Firebird Mail

Thunderbird Email Download