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) ?

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