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Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 20:46 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: Firebird vs. Mozilla? by stevenj
Parent article: Building A Better Browser (Forbes)

They don't mention Mozilla 1.6, but they mention Mozilla 1.5:

Eventually Firebird will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won't happen before it reaches version 1.5.
One could argue that all their praises would apply to Mozilla 1.6 if the Mozilla team did what they promised to do.

I'm not sure about version 1.6, but the last time I was using Mozilla it didn't have tab browsing and popup blocking enabled by default. Some of the Forbes readers may have problems reconfiguring their browsers.


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Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 20:57 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

Mozilla has all that on by default. Where Mozilla Firebird shines, though, is in the over-all user interface. The Mozilla suite was designed to be as close as possible to the old Netscape Communicator interface, down to the preferences control panel and what-not. Mozilla Firebird has a simplified, streamlined interface that feels much more approachable to me, even though I have run Mozilla as my only browser for the last few years. I like Mozilla Firebird's preferences panel, I like Mozilla Firebird's use of site icons in the bookmark menus, I like that there's only one menu item for adding a bookmark, and it defaults to a dialog that can serve the old 'File Bookmark' function. I like how fast it is, I like how clean it is, I like how compatible it is.

When you add in the fact that you can get a nightly GTK2-Xft build with support for anti-aliased font rendering on Linux, there's really not much comparison. Without all of the extraneous Mozilla features and Communicator legacy interface mandates, Mozilla Firebird is free to be a better browser.

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 21:12 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

Of course, as soon as I give such fulsome praise to Mozilla Firebird, I go and download today's daily build (linked from the top of MozillaZine) and find it broken.

Fortunately it was easy to pull down a slightly-less-recent build.

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 21:59 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

To be fair, I've seen Mozilla with antialiased fonts in Debian unstable. That said, I'm typing these words in Mozilla Firebird.

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 5, 2004 5:24 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Mozilla has all that on by default. Where Mozilla Firebird shines, though, is in the over-all user interface.
CTRL+k is so sweet! The separate integrated Google search field is excellent too (which is what CTRL-k applies focus to). One annoying factor about Mozilla from a UI standpoint is that the location field means one thing if you hit enter and another if you click "Search".

I also like the way when a link is opened in a new tab, it's loaded in the background with Firebird.

Firebird vs. Mozilla? Seperate Search Field

Posted Feb 5, 2004 20:37 UTC (Thu) by ptr (guest, #5885) [Link]

Hmmm... It's hard to say anything general here, I liked the Mozilla approach better (still using firebird right now).

I do not like the idea of wasting screen space. I often like to type in quite some keywords and since the search field is quite small it scrolls... That's really a minor annoyance and I see your argument though, I have just never considered it that way.

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 23:59 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

check again, the mention mozilla 1.6 as being released. when they talk aobut firebird not becomeing the standard browser until 1.5 they are talking about firebird 1.5, not mozilla 1.5.

this seems strange, but matches up with the last I have heard from the firebird side of things.

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