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Mozilla Firebird

1sikbITCH

1sikbITCH

Diamond Member
I just want to hear from some Mozilla users, if I could.

I know there's a general disdain for all things Microsoft around here, and I'm always willing to try something new (down with the man, yadda yadda yadda 🙂). Therefore when I read 5 or 6 posts telling somebody to get Mozilla, I installed the latest milestone of Mozilla Firebird (5-16-03).

I created my profile and customized a little here and there. It's not hard to find good documentation and there are decent forums as well.

I know it's a work in progress and all that, but it's extremely buggy and makes for an unpleasant browsing experience. I'm not going to go listing all the bugs or things I don't like.
I've looked at the builds since the milestone, and none seem to fix anything that would warrant upgrading again (unless I missed something). I'm all for helping to beta test but I still would like to just come home from work and read the boards and my email without a lot of hassles.

What is so great about it that makes everyone look past all the bugs? Or is it simply that it's not IE? I'd like to be excited about it, but I am finding that rather difficult.

Thx.





 
It's pretty simple really. Mozilla is buggy for some, not buggy for others. For example, my PC runs Mozilla great; no bugs whatsoever. However, Mozilla can't run at all on my cousin's laptop at all; even with a clean install. So you can't assume that "everyone is looking past all the bugs", because the fact is that some people may see bugs and others won't. You're just one of the unlucky ones that see a lot of bugs.

All I can say is that Bugzilla is ready and waiting. File a bug report and see if you can make a difference in making the product better. Also, if you don't think you're the only one seeing bugs, try the Mozillazine forums. Let them know what build you're using as well as the bugs you are seeing.
 
Honesly you should try the latest nightly build, the programers are always tweeking things and there are a lot more fixes in those than are documented, atleast that is my experience
 
I wouldn't recommend the milestone builds...get a recommended nightly build (check the Firebird forums to see other people's experiences).
 
I haven't found many bugs. List a couple of them (specifics are nice 😉), so I can play around a bit and possibly see what you see. Maybe they aren't mozilla bugs, but website bugs.
 
I have Firebird on 3 computers.... none of them have had a bug for over a year of Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird usage.

In fact I'd say I can't see how people can put up with the buggy IE. Just having to click "ok" to the "your settings prevent this page..." with EVERY Internet Explorer page load makes Mozilla a better product.
 
I haven't had any major bugs with my Firebird 0.6. The only one that I've encountered is the profile selection bug. If you create more than one profile, Firebird will ALWAYS ask which profile to use at start up, even if you tell it to always use a certain profile. It seems like an easy bug to fix, but I don't think they've fixed it yet.
 
I use Mozilla (not Firebird) on 2 different Windows boxes and Galeon on 2 different Linux boxes every day and it runs great, I can't rememeber the las time either of them crashed.
 
I'm not trying to bash Mozilla, just trying to understand it better. It never crashes, it just doesn't behave as I'd like. I'm not up for aggressively beta-testing it or anything else. I don't have time in my life for that stuff. I just want to read my boards and my email and then play some videogames before bed. If it would auto-submit error codes or something, that would be great.

I will get the latest nightly build and give it a go.

I wasn't going to start spouting off a bunch of problems I was having, but since someone asked, I'll list two big ones and maybe there is a setting I've missed somewhere.

Mozilla seems to be very slow. I doesn't load webpages nearly as fast as IE. It has to fill everything in, as if I was on dialup almost. First all the pictures are empty boxes with little symbols in the corner, then the pictures finally start appearing one at a time. All this only takes a couple seconds; so it's still just an annoyance. IE loads these same pages instantly.

Thi one is not a Mozilla bug, although they can fix it if they wanted to. I've researched a little and found that the Mozilla guys say "fix the internet, we're not changing".
Frequently, when you click on picture or movie links on websites, the page opens to text instead of a pic or movie. This is explained to be because website programmers mistakenly use the wrong Mime association or something. I really have only a cursory understanding of it. IE supposedly makes corrections so that you can still access the pic or movie, where as Mozilla says that it's up to the user to email the webmaster and make them fix the website.

If this was just one website here and there I could see it; but there seems to be a lot of sites out there that are wrong. I would imagine that 99% of the people are just casual web surfers who want to see a picture when they click, not have to go email some company and fight with them to fix their web page. Why can't Mozilla just bite the bullet and adapt as well? It's not about the programmers, it's about a good experience for the user.
I do appreciate the stance, but most people will not go thru the hassle. They will just go back to IE.

Again, please don't get upset. I'm just asking a few questions. If I asked them on the Mozilla forums it seems they'd get all defensive and start flaming, so I figured I could get some good answers here (which I have).
 
1. Slow load? I have no idea, mine is as fast as IE. Check the tweaks section (http://texturizer.net/firebird/tips.html)
2. The only file mozilla will not open is a windows media file. I usually right click and save as.
3. Some sites don't follow HTML standards. These sites may not work right in Firebird/Mozilla, yet they'll be fine in IE (= coding only for IE = bad = doesn't get my browsing) 🙂
 
Just curious but if you think IE is a good browser (as it sounds like IE does everything you want to do) then why bother with Mozilla Firebird at all? I know you want to try a diff. browser but there are other alternatives such as MyIE or Crazy Browser that uses the IE engine.

Personally, I favor using Firebird since it's faster than IE on my system since I can middle click and open numerious pages (mostly links) and I can just move from one tab to another when finished reading a tab. Also, Firebird has tons of extensions that can make the browsing experience much more powerful/configurable (i.e., I can disable all flash advertisements, block all advertisement images, set mouse gestures for several dozen functions, highlight any words on a web page and easily right-click to either search for it on google, amazon, go to a website based on the highlighted word, etc).

I don't know what kind of system you have, but if you have a slow one, try the P2/P3 optimized build as it appears to be quicker on slow machines.
 
Well, I didn't know if IE was a good browser because it's almost the only one I've used, and for the past year or so I switched to Avant browser, which seems to be better, faster, and less buggy than IE. It still is missing some things though.

I did only try Mozilla because I'd read about how great it is from here, and so I thought I'd try to find out if I was doing something wrong before I just uninstalled it.
My machine is 1.5 Ghz with 512mb PC2700 and so I'm sure it's fast enough to load web pages 😀
I said before, it's slower loading than IE, but I really should have said "slower than Avant". I think Avant is probably faster than IE.

I am off to try the tweaks and newest build and I'll see how it goes from there.
 
Well, Mozilla loads differently from IE. It seems faster to me. At forums, the tables load first so I can actually read the threads. The pictures load after that. With IE, the tables loaded row by row, which was insanely annoying to me.

BTW, isn't Avant just MSIE with extra features?

Also, go to this page and check out some of the extra features you can get by downloading extensions. That certainly got me excited about Firebird/Mozilla.
 
There is a tweak on that page that Thera supplied that fixes the slow loading page. Evidently it waits to load the page until it recieves the whole page. I created a .js file and added a piece of code and it fixed that.

Very nice 🙂
 
Igowerf, I thought Avant was supposedly a stripped down and rebuilt version of IE. I don't know how much of that is true, but I do like it better than IE.
 
Avant, Crazy Browser, MyIE all use MSIE engine. They're more or less extra extensions built-in on top of MSIE. I've tried them all & MyIE gets my vote (I still use for those few websites that're written strictly for MSIE, with which Moz. Firebird has some problems).
 
Originally posted by: 1sikbITCH
There is a tweak on that page that Thera supplied that fixes the slow loading page. Evidently it waits to load the page until it recieves the whole page. I created a .js file and added a piece of code and it fixed that.

Very nice 🙂
Click to expand...

I'm glad that worked. I applied that tweak also and noticed a difference on slower websites. One of the neat things about Mozilla is the ability to change just about anything you want. Some people like that, others don't. No big deal.

Ultimately people should just use the browser that fits them the best. 🙂
 
I use Mozilla rather than Firebird, seeing as I've notices a few annoyances with Firebird, but it's still prerelease, so I expect no more.

Haven't had any problems with Mozilla though, even my bank supports it.
Heck even microsoft.com works in it 🙂
 
Heck even microsoft.com works in it
Click to expand...

The KB used to have CSS problems, overlapping text in Mozilla. But I found a userContent.css section that fixed it and now it seems that MS has fixed their CSS mistakes.
 
Can someone tell me the advantage with running this firebird over say mozilla 1.4?
Is the firebird "Just" the browser?
 
May be out of topic, but does anyone here use netcaptor? I believe it uses the MSIE engine also. I think it's pretty good.
 
Can someone tell me the advantage with running this firebird over say mozilla 1.4?
Is the firebird "Just" the browser?
Click to expand...

Basically, yes. Firebird is where the Mozilla project will be going in the future, just a web and mail client.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Can someone tell me the advantage with running this firebird over say mozilla 1.4?
Is the firebird "Just" the browser?
Click to expand...

Basically, yes. Firebird is where the Mozilla project will be going in the future, just a web and mail client.
Click to expand...

Until AOL gets ahold of it.

 
Originally posted by: RalfHutter
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Can someone tell me the advantage with running this firebird over say mozilla 1.4?
Is the firebird "Just" the browser?
Click to expand...

Basically, yes. Firebird is where the Mozilla project will be going in the future, just a web and mail client.
Click to expand...

Until AOL gets ahold of it.
Click to expand...

AOL releases Netscape, which besides the shared source, is an entirely different animal.
 
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