Anybody here like the Firebird?
 

Not the car.

I have heard from a few ppl that Firebird is a better browser than IE, and I am a big fan of tabbed browsing.

Any opinions on which is better for running on WinXP? (at least until I find WLAN drivers for my Centrino laptop)

I used Mozilla on XP and I use it on Slack. Firebird is better than IE, but not as good as Mozilla, to me - though I still tend to use 1.3 - I've had 1.4 and have 1.5 but, eh. But it's an individual choice. Try any of them out for yourself. They're all free. (Except Opera. Bleh.)

I am kinda disappointed with firebird, I wanted something faster with less bulk than Opera so i downloaded firebird and its slower than Opera and mozilla, I was surprised. I went back to Opera.

less bulk? 3 MB (opera) vs. 6 MB (firebird) ? :scratch:

I was under the impression that firebird was smaller and I did not know that it needed mozilla until after i installed it. I would not have tried it if i had known that.

i did make a mistake. it should've said firebird after 6MB not mozilla. but i wasn't aware that firebird needed mozilla. at least it doesn't in linux.

It doesn't need mozilla - it just uses the same gecko rendering engine. All browsers are ridiculously huge. Mosaic was like 200_K_. Rendering tables and providing SSL requires 200K plus 3,6,10MB?

I'm being silly, but my point is that every GUI browser but maybe dillo is bloated. And the penalty is really only in startup times. Mozilla takes 1.5 seconds, firebird takes 1, opera maybe takes .9. Pay the fraction of a second once and surf on. After that, mozilla renders just as fast as firebird. And regarding the startup times, IE is always loaded, being integrated with the Windows shell, so it gets a head start. But mozilla has a pre-launch feature you can check that keeps *it* loaded in the background on Windows, too, narrowing the gap. I don't think it has that in Linux.

But all this is really trivial to me. I fire up mozilla with the lo-fi skin and I have my surfing and my mail and nice functionality and a great degree of control and it looks nice. I don't remember what popups are. Nobody randomly resizes my windows with javascript. The bookmark management and settings are convenient and coherent. Mozilla is very comfortable to me. It's a Cadillac of browsers - maybe big and bulky but roomy and comfortable. I'm all for lightness where I don't need crap in my way - I run flux instead of the IDEs. But you need a Cadillac for the infohighway. *g*

I like Stravinsky's "Firebird"

:)

I use firebird on Linux and XP, i really like it.

I have also had a go with thunderbird mail client, but I have not got used to it yet, still use outlook depressed

"Anybody here like the firebird"

The short answer - Yes - Tabbed browsing is a clear draw - thanks and respect to the many developers and others who have worked on both the Mozilla Suite and Firebird.

A not so short answer, oh yeah... It replaced Opera for me, the tabbed browsing rocks... and its much faster with gtk2+freetype font support. One thing though, the download sizes above are a little off. Back when it was Phoenix, .3 through .5 it was 6megs as a .tar.gz, now with .6, .6.1 and .7 are all 9Mb downloads and 27Megs fully unpacked. No matter what it should be quicker then Mozilla becuase afterall it is just Mozilla with all of the extras ripped out like the newsreader and the mail component... and when you download mozilla you have 90% of the development libs to go with it.

Still, now that Mozilla is free of the AOL influence, a lot of the older Netscape-era kruft is getting replaced. I've got an old friend who works for them still, his blog is a pretty good resource on Firebird goodies, plug-ins, themes, extensions, etc... also check out the mplayer-plugin that handles... goodness, bloody well everything: quicktime, rp, wmp, flash, etc... anyway, Asa's page:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/

Cheers,

Finegan

Used Mozilla, learnt about Phoenix, tried it, hated it... Heard it was reborn as Firebird, tried it, love it!

Have used Opera since it's Shareware days on Windows (now it's adware or something, right?). At first, I felt that it was speedy and all that... But when I compared it to Mozilla, it's not _obviously_ superior to it at all. Sure, some parts of Opera are much more polished than Moz/Firebird... but that doesn't make it necessarily better.

I'm a full-time Firebird user now... now if only Thunderbird can handle hyperlinks the way it should ;)

You need dillo :)
Damn fast.
www.dillo.org

Much, much preferred. My #1 (of IE, Firebird, Dillo and Konqueror). There aren't words to describe how amazing tabbed browsing is. It's also the faster of the browsers (except Dillo, but I can't get past Dillo not showing images).

trinity

I use firebird at work on WinNT, and I love it. As stated above, I have forgotten what popups are, tabbed browsing is great, and the built in google search beats the stupid 'google bar' that I had to DL for IE. The thing is just slick. I use Mozilla on my Slackware box at home, but at work I only wanted a browser, and not the whole suit of apps that comes with it, so Firebird it was. I haven't looked back since.

Makes me wonder why I spent years getting carpal tunnell trying to fight off all of those pop-up windows.

slight

I love Firebird, it's much faster than Mozilla. That Google search box is very handy. Of course, I can't live without tabbed windows and popup blocking. I was telling a friend last night that I'm so used to not having popups that I got really surprised last time I used Internet Explorer and a window popped up from a site. I didn't even know they had popup ads because I had never visited it using another browser. Popup blocking is so fantastic that you simply forget it's there and take it for granted.

I use Opera even though the latest Mozilla versions seem to be faster than Opera.

But I'm not speaking about loading time - at least one browser is always loaded on my comps anyway. I'm speaking about rendering times and general handling. Mozilla's back-function became a lot faster recently.

However I just love the input possibilities of Opera. Mousegestures rock. I know they're in Firebird, too - at least as a plugin but it just doesn't feel the same. Plus it lacks the print preview (not that important - only when you're supposed to make your websites printerfriendly ;) ) and the QUICK PREFERENCES.

Disabling all graphics and/or using an own stylesheet is very valueable on bad webdesigns. :)

PS: I also muss that Backspace acts like the backbutton.

Thanks for the Dillo info. I just downloaded it and installed it and it is super fast but there doesnt seem to be java and javascript support but it is extremely fast. Thanks...

Well no matter what.

Firebird will eventually become mozilla and the current mozilla will be freezed.
But I'm still using mozilla and I'll wait until then.

But just remember, Firebird is still in 0.x version. So don't expect to be perfect.

<- firebird junkie :D

mozilla is still the cadillac of browsers -- it's just so smooth -- but ever since i tried firebird a month or so ago it's pretty much all i use.

tip: ctrl+tab scrolls through your open tabs. (i just learned that the other day, thought i'd pass it on :) ).

more extensions:
http://www.texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/
:cool:

Made my decision. I went with Mozilla.
Tab browsing is NICE.

Seem to be getting less pop-ups too.

My only complaint is the long load time, but I have enough RAM to keep it open all the time

It doesn' t do javascript/java or frames (although it gives you a choice of which frame to diskplay at one time)

I had to use Mozilla today and I couldn't wait to go back to Firebird. I never thought it would happen because I used to love Mozilla with all my heart.

It has to be one of the best Internet browsers out there. I use it all the time, gotta love the tabbed browsing.

1st thing I did with my new laptop, before even dual booting it, was download firebird and thunderbird just so I wouldn't ever (ever, ever!) have to use IE and OE...

I love both of them. Work great; for one who uses Mozilla mail and Mozilla browser under linux the functionality is very familiar and easy to work with.

Even on my old desktop box any flavour of Mozilla loads and works faster under win ME (!) than IE or OE; there are cooler tools available as well.

Under linux, I'll be sticking to Mozilla, when I don't get all impatient and use lynx instead for the more text heavy sites.

jd

best browser ever. ever.

the ONLY thing that should be improved is to speed up the startup times. other than that it is truly perfect.

I still mainly run Windows and I would run Firebird all the time except when I load Sun's Java on my XP machine no Java works anywhere. IE also has a browser toolbar I can customize better. I have everything on one line and the back/forward arrows are on the right.



As for Thunderbird, the only thing keeping me from using it 100% of the time is that it doesn't allow for multiple identities. Other than that it kicks the crap out of Outlook Express.

I use firebird for everything. Except when I have to do something in an IE only website.:mad: Tabbed browsing is sort of feature of my hand. In IE I always try to press the middle mouse button but no success.;)

I almost forgot, the pop-up blocking is the best I have every seen. I have never seen a pop-up in mozilla but a lot with some 3rd party blockers in IE.:)

I think that the thread starter mentioned something about centrino drivers. Intel is still working on the drivers but stay tuned.:)

Re: Anybody here like the Firebird?
 

if you run windows, anything is better than IE. IE has 2 many security holes that allow sites to install stuff into your registry and what not. if anything atleast go with Netscape or something.

I wery much liked firebird but I already had a good browser, Opera 7.20 is so good that I dont want to diss it.