Firebird vs. Mozilla? [LWN.net]

Firebird vs. Mozilla?

Posted Feb 4, 2004 20:57 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736)
In reply to: Firebird vs. Mozilla? by proski
Parent article: Building A Better Browser (Forbes)

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.

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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 (subscriber, #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.