Firebird. Discuss

piersk

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 has just come out. Opinions please.

Bunkermaster

ermm what do we think about what m8?

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Bunkermaster
ermm what do we think about what m8?

The fact that the Mozilla Browser Project has become so large and comprehensive that it has to have its own browser project?

matt_4013

I like it. It seems to be compatible with almost all of the w3 standards I can throw at it, it's reasonably quick and it doesn't play with your source like IE does. I'm a big fan of tabbed browsing, although this isn't unique to Firebird, it's still pretty funky. There are some really cool extensions for it (like StumbleUpon)
which create a better browsing experience 🙂 One thing i do find annoying is that it's beginning to use quite a bit of resources. Unfortunately at work, I'm running on a POS machine, and I'm having a bit of trouble with it taking too long to do anything.

Anyway, overall I think it's pretty good, up there with the better browsers.

piersk

Sorry, I meant just the Firebird browser.

largo

for people running debian (unstable), packages and info is available at :

http://pryan.org/phoenix/joshk/

About to start download piersk, should update this post soon.

coditoergosum

I love it. I think it's a god send. I've been using it since about .4 (when it was still called phoenix), and it's come a LONG way in the short time I've been using it.

It's very standards compliant. It won't render crap code for you... which means you learn to write good code. The user interface is amazing. I've gotten so used to using mouse gestures now that when I try to use IE I get extremely frustrated. I absolutely love tabbed browsing too. All this and it's more efficient than IE too. I did some benchmarking, and on my win2k system it usually takes up between 10%-40% less memory than IE.

It is still in "beta" though, so there are some bugs. You can get info about them up front though by reading the info on the firebird project site.

The only thing about it that I don't like (and I'm sure it'll be fixed soon), is it doesn't handle flash so great. An example is this site: http://www.cloud10.org (not work safe!). After browsing the site a little pages stop getting rendered, and eventually it crashes completely. The other minor annoyance is it takes about 2-3 seconds longer than IE to start up. It's hard to compete with IE in that area though, since it's actually built into windows. I'm sure the developers will make improvements in these areas soon though.

Just my $.02.

largo

Thumbs up.

It's clean, fast and presents customization options very well. I didn't try plugging in java or flash just yet, will try that soonish.

goldbug

I've yet to have a problem with it.
However, it would've been nice to be able to use my old profile from 0.5 (you can, but it's not recommended).

Still have yet to see if it has the same bug that pissed me off in 0.5 (some flash-laden websites constantly reloading/refreshing). I haven't noticed it yet. Maybe it's been fixed.

Sxooter

Warning, the following post has been deemed OT. Since this is a very common occurance in the Echo Lounge, nothing has been done about it at all.

Really, the Firebird was a great car back in the day, before GM turned it into an econobox in the early 80s.

Take a look at this beauty:

http://www.users.qwest.net/~debstan/firebird.jpg

Of course, a 1964 firebird beats them all. Back in that period of time Gibson was making some truly awesom stuff:

http://www.bestguitars.com/collection/64RedVII.html

Of course, 1934 was another banner year for the firebird, this time it was again a form of transportation:

http://www.springersmusic.co.uk/images/photos/cars/Alvis%20Firebird.JPG

goldbug

What about a '73 firebird?
A girl I dated in high school drove one:
http://www.hemmings.com/carshow/getsinglephoto.cfm?HMN_ID=2976&CURRENT_ALBUM_ID=2976&wordlimit=120

coditoergosum

Har har har.

:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Sxooter

Sorry, I really did have a point. It's that naming one piece of software firebird when there's already a well known piece of software named that can lead to confusion.

Bunkermaster

ok, i installed it and to my surprise it is great 🙂

one thing is missing (or i didn't find it), the ability to change language in http header... Would hate to recompile the whole thing...

goldbug

Is there something in the prefs.js (home dir) to change that? I've noticed since they changed the preferences dialog, it's missing all kinds of "important" stuff, ability to shut off (in that dialog) the auto image-resizing, change control of tabbed browsing, for example(s).

[EDIT]
I just realized, you're probably talking more about the interface than the http accept languages, which, I'm not sure if the Mozilla language packs are drop-in compatible with Firebird or not.

If you are talking about the http accept languages, as you probably already know, you can try putting:

user_pref("intl.accept_languages", "en-us, en");

into your prefs.js file, changing en-us,en to whatever you like.
[/EDIT]

coditoergosum

I'm not sure if it's possible to change those specific things, but you can expand the capabilities greatly by installing extensions. You can get all the available extensions here: http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html

I assume one of them should give you what you're looking for.

goldbug

Bunkermaster, if you find the language packs are somewhat compatible between the two, perhaps add:

user_pref("general.useragent.contentlocale", "US");
user_pref("general.useragent.locale", "en-US");

to Firebird's prefs.js (changing locales obviously).

Note: these are only guesses, I'm not going to bother to find if they work 🙂

Correction
It looks like Firebird rewrites prefs.js at load time, but those things can be changed by going to about:config in the URL bar.

goldbug

Okay, enough of my non-working hacks. (Installing mozilla language packs in Firebird doesn't seem to work)

try this:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_otherproj.html#fireb_0.6

Bunkermaster

What I really need is a way to easily change language in accept so I can test my multi language web solutions... Thanks for the research though 😃

goldbug

Yeah, the setting I mentioned before (intl.accept_languages) can be set in about:config
(And it works, at least with fr-fr, fr, en-en, en as I've tested)