First Impression of Mozilla Firebird
July 30th, 2003, 14:13
Well, it’s not the comfort what i’m used to (i’m using K-Meleon 0.7.1 all the way, NO darn lousy Internet Exploder, if i can avoid it in ANY circumstances):
- Firebird isnt as highly customizable and configurable as K-Meleon, eg. it doesnt give you, right in the Configuration/Options-section, the option to choose what Http_User_Agent-string you want to use (of course you still can adjust it manually by editing prefs.js, but this i can do with standard Mozilla as well …)
- Firebird’s option list is very small, compared with the one of Mozilla, but this might be thanks to this “i want a small, uncluttered browser”-style they try to establish
- the theme/skin-interface looks nice, but doesnt work out well: still, you cant change the navigation bars, too, so the themes partly look very lousy integrated (which they surely aint, but a blackish design doesnt loojk that if the user doesnt use the standard ‘fade to gray’ windoze interface/look’n'fool)
- i dont like the idea of a navigation/url toolbar that cant be adjusted completely to one’s taste - i’d like this search input field NOT to be there, but search using the url input field
instead, as it has been with mozilla since way back (maybe version 1.1 or so) - nice idea, stolen from Galeon, but definitly NOT my cup of tea!
- rendering is - as expected, quite smooth - as i had already the chance testing out Mozi-Meleon, which is based on Mozilla v1.5a, too | update: some flaw i found which i already noticed with Mozilla v1.4 (this is why i re-installed Mozilla 1.3 and removed first one) is still there and seems to get speed in fucking up the engine - sometimes, text is displayed TWICE although it is there only ONCE, and in no way wrong CSS/JS-rendering is involved there!
- following one seems to be an unique bug in the Mozilla/Gecko Engine, but not one of Firebird, as it appeared in Mozi-Meleon, too: if trying to go to a ringsurf.com-website, meaning, the MAIN info page about this webring, the browser opened a file download dialogue (”Save as …”) instead, and couldnt be (eg. opening this offered content again with this app) tricked to open this site
- nice feature (also to be found in some web accessoires/extension sets for IE): if you select some content/text on the site and then click on it with right-mouse context menu, you can choose to display exactly ONLY THIS highlighted part of the source code - very well done - till now the ONLY pro compared against Mozi-/K-Meleon
- second one: they have integraded a javascript console or maybe just let it stay there, where the guys of mozilla.org have placed it - which way it truely was, doesnt matter for me, but what does is that its THERE, waiting to be used for something good 
- sadly, there is no good plugin stuff already shipped with this pack of mozilla-based taste - just the plain old standard, crampy looking plugings like quicktime, etc.
- bookmarks: it looks like firebird automatically did import my IE favorites WITHOUT asking me to do so - VERY annoying, as i STRICTLY want them seperated! - needs to be included somewhere!
- finally, Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 looks to me more concepted for the drooling masses, the newcomer, the standard Internet Exploder-user - but then, there are still several shit missing, eg. packaged flash 5/6 and shockwave-plugins with the firebird package, also i’d THEN suggest to add the netscape-aimed Windows Mediaplayer-plugin, too, so the unexperienced user won’t have a chance complaining about something missing
- update: some very annoying shit is: they nowhere tell you on which release they build firebird, nor go they into detail about their oh so great ‘extensions’-system. maybe saying: “yeah, we havent written anything about this yet” would be WAAAY better than just doing so as if the searching developer was some SUPERdau (Dümmster Anzunehmender User == Dumbest Possible User ever) - dont ya fuck w’ me, wisenuts!
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