Mozilla Foundation charges out of the gates today with a handful of new product releases. Heavyweight full-featured browser Mozilla 1.5, lightweight standalone browser Firebird 0.7, and email/newsgroup client Thunderbird 0.3.
In conjunction with the release, Mozilla announces a nicely designed beta version of the upcoming Mozilla.org web site with heavy design contributions from our well-known garden proprietor, Dave Shea. Well done, Dave and Mozilla team. An excellent idea to put the site out in front of users as a beta, let people respond with praise, criticism, and suggestions, then make improvements before official launch.
About two months ago, I switched from IE6 over to Firebird as my default browser, and haven’t looked back. I’m ashamed it took me that long to switch. Firebird is an excellent, powerful standalone browser, free of the extras loaded into the larger Mozilla application. The base install alone has enough features to win over converts. And if those aren’t enough, a boat-load of extensions are available as add-ons. The new Firebird site (Update: front page has since been replaced with original design) presents a product tour complete with lots of screenshots, as well as a chart (Update: link removed, as chart no longer exists) comparing Firebird with IE6, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape. The Firebird site design is a little over the top with the flame theme. But I like seeing the Foundation take these steps with the Mozilla.org beta site and the Firebird product site. They’re pushing toward a simpler, yet more complete sell of their product line. It will help spread the word and let many more know of these fine alternatives.
If you don’t already have Firebird installed, you should go download it today and give it a whirl. I highly recommend it.
Posted in Technology, Web
55 comments (Comments closed)
Any idea where the appropriate place to give feedback on the new beta site is?
Steven: The announcment on the front page of Mozilla.org says to send feedback to webmaster@mozilla.org. I’m surprised there’s no contact/feedback form. Hope they have their spam filters in place.
Thanks for the recommendation. Firebird looks and behaves very well and I definitely like its many features. The only reason I liked using IE was because of this great extension called IE Spell. I find that being able to spell check a form (like this comment) before I submit it is very useful — if one becomes available for Firebird I don’t think I would give IE a sencond look.
On the chart comparing features, one of the comparison points is “Easy Bookmark Management.” This is going to be a broad generalization, but the open source community does tend to use subjective measurements like this to flaunt their products. I’m not sure what their definition of Easy is, but if pressing Ctrl+B is hard for them to do, perhaps they shouldn’t be subjectively rating features.
I’m not trying to discredit Firebird as a browser, I use it myself occasionally to check website formatting among other things, and find it to be quite good…but they just need to drop the overtone against Microsoft.
Ed, there has been an ongoing project to get spellchecking baked into mozilla, so I’d suspect it’s only a matter of time before it works its way into Firebird too.
I also downloaded Firebird today, along with an extension called Web Developer 0.4 by Chris Pederick. It has some nice toolbar widgets such as style/images/javascript/cookie disablers, and can outline images with missing alt/title attributes, etc.
The PNH developer toolbar is also a great tool to add.
I have used Firebird as the browser I do testing in for a while now. Zeldman’s advice that it makes life easier to test standards based designs in the best browser before working around the quirks in IE has saved me lots of time.
However it was only recently I switched to Firebird as my browser of choice and haven’t used IE6 willingly since. Firebird seems faster, is much less buggy and, most of all, has tabbed browsing. I’d recommend it to anyone.
Does it bother anyone that Firebird, arguably one of the nicest browsers I’ve ever used, has a constantly changing identity?
Every new build drops a new icon on the program, and while it’s nice that the most recent icon makes sense (I’m alluding to the non-sensical “Quake III meets Soviet crest” a few builds back) one can’t help but wonder when the Firebird team will wake up and realize that solid (or at the very least; consistent) branding is important if they want to become a more mainstream browser. I think the firebird team desperately needs to settle on one solid and easily recognizable logo for the program, and then leave it alone long enough for people to begin recognizing it.
I use Firebird almost exclusively on my new laptop but IE is much faster on my old desktop. One thing Firebird/Moz needs to resolve is the handling of Windows Media Player content. You can’t just click on a lot of it but have to save it first. For example, .wmv files will display as text if you click on them.
Once it can handle the media, I’ll start recommending it to everyone.
I think the Firebird developers are not so lucky regarding naming and branding, but it should be noted that the browser we currently know as Mozilla Firebird will be “re-branded” as Mozilla Browser when it reaches version 1.0. IMHO, the Firebird name packs more punch.
I think it is smarter to consolidate the naming scheme and keep things clear. If the average web user is going to switch, they just need one name: Mozilla. Not Mozilla suite, Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. I find the *bird naming scheme confusing and I often have to check myself when I’m referring to Firebird of Thunderbird.
i’ve been using FB for a few versions now as well and have only kept IE on because i’m a developer and need to check the site in IE due to various bugs / inconsistencies in IE.
the ability to create your own toolbars / extensions is beguiling, a dash of CSS/XML and you’re off! no need for fancy-pants direct-x programming. and the speed, standards-compliance, tabs, great bookmark system, *sigh*… i could go on.. what a dream.
thanks FB team!
I think everyone would agree that Firebird is a fresh breath of air to web browsing. However, I haven’t switched for one reason. As a “User Experience” professional I feel it’s more important to look through the same eyes as over 90% of web users. That reason alone is enough for me stay with IE. I have no major problems and it is plenty fast enough. The standards issue is whole other issue though. I do love tabbed browsing, but the fact that I use FeedDemon for all my browsing now, I get IE with tabs with FD help. Am I crazy for sticking with IE?
I switched to Firebird a little while ago, and like you, haven’t looked back.
Without plugins it has amazing load times, is quick to launch and tabbed browsing is a must for any web browser I must say.
I now use Firebird exclusively at home and only use IE for testing purposes.
Now, if only my employer wouldn’t insist on a standardised work environment based on IE. *sigh*
Michael: As a “User Experience” professional I feel it’s more important to look through the same eyes as over 90% of web users. […] Am I crazy for sticking with IE?
That’s a tough one. It’s not the excuse I held on to by sticking with IE for so long. But it *is* one of the reasons I switched away from Macs as my primary machine several years ago. As I began to design more for the web, I was discouraged whenever I’d see designs I produced with a Mac on a friend or colleague’s Windows box. That, and you could run a web server on Windows then, which was extra helpful for beginning to learn SSI and more complex server-side scripting when away from a net connection.
I’m not sure how much water the excuse holds for web browsers though. It’s certainly important to ensure a site you’re designing appears as intended in IE, thus, I’ll never get very far away from IE as long as it’s in use by so many people. But I prefer to know which sites I’m browsing only spent the effort for IE, rather than trying to create one version for all browsers. No matter how popular IE is, there’s no excuse for ignoring remaining browsers, given today’s choices and support for web standards.
And all Firebird’s features (a mix of custom features, and some carried over from Mozilla) was enough to push me over the edge. I want to experience what the other people experience, not what the masses experience. Anyone can use proprietary IE code. But it takes a little more patience to make sure one design renders well in multiple browsers.
I admit it took me a couple of days of forcing myself to use Firebird to get used to it. I had to hide my IE shortcut icon and switch the default browser preference. I was determined to try it out. Once I started learning the features, shortcuts, and the amount I could add on, it was a no-brainer. But I had to make the leap and allow it to be my default browser to realize it.
I admit it took me a couple of days of forcing myself to use Firebird to get used to it. I had to hide my IE shortcut icon and switch the default browser preference
Yeah, I had to do the same. Next step is hiding the Outlook icon.
About viewing through the eyes of your users: that was my #1 reason for sticking with IE for as long as I did, but now that I look back I realize it was misguided.
The problem is that when you’re developing, you’re using one of the poorer browsers on the market for standards support. And your code will adapt to its quirks, to the point where it becomes somewhat dependent on IE’s broken rendering. When you view in other browsers which render it correctly, it looks broken, and you lose hair fixing it.
But, if you develop primarily in a more standards-compliant browser like Mozilla or Safari, your code conforms closer to expected behaviour, and testing across platforms and browsers is *way* easier.
I ruminated about this in the summer, and the following few months have proven this method to work remarkably well.
Uh, and lest we stray too far off topic, thanks for the post Doug!
The design of the forthcoming, beta version of Mozilla.org (thanks Dave!) is precisely what Mozilla needs -in terms of mainstream appeal- in order to take advantage of the current climate of IE stagnation. Stripping the repellent, geeky image in favor of an AOL-type, user-friendly approach is one of the basic steps in making Mozilla succeed and reach user critical mass, specially when faced with a 40-billion-dollar behemoth that can buy entire corporations at will.
Is it just me, or am I noticing a bug on Firebird 0.7 (Windows) where the page scrollbar simply dissapears with most sites? (here, for example). I do get by with my mouse wheel, but it’s quite a critical flaw. Other than that, I’ve been a loyal Firebird user since many months ago.
I was a very long-time user of IE, have been dissatisfied with the state of Netscape somewhere in the 4.x releases. Firebird, happily, kicks IE’s ass and I was thrilled to finally find a browser that was faster, leaner, and had more features than what Microsoft was putting out.
I also test all my sites under Firebird and then do checks on IE and the rest. Generally, there aren’t a tremendous number of quirks to date, which I’m happy about.
Couple questions:
(1) Anyone have any favorite extensions?
(2) Any ideas as to how we, as web developers, can evangelize Firebird and Mozilla so as to increase usage? If Microsoft is abandoning development on IE, it seems that this is certainly the route to take.
Oh and a pointer for Mozilla/Firebird fans:
I highly recommend checking out and trolling through MozillaZine.
It’s a great developer/user resource for all things related to the software being developed under Mozilla.org and contains a very active forum/discussion group.
I use FB with Tabbrowser extensions, Things They Left Out and Paste and Go extensions.
I’m too experiencing the disappearing scrollbar thing, along with a handful of other bugs that in a couple of hours pushed me back to 0.6.1. For one, weird occasional background misplacement, pieces of the page appearing over images when scrolling via selection (due to lack of scrollbar)…
I like the new mozilla.org design, I just think the mozilla logo needs more work, that border is ugly and unecessary, and well, this giant red lizard thing just doesn’t cut, but then again maybe it’s just me.
Well, actually this new design needs a lot more work, but it certainly is going in the right direction. I’ll try to give more well-thought and detailed feedback directly to mozilla.org.
I agree that fb needs a solid identity, but not the crappy one it’s been carrying for now. I believe this beta period might be a proper time to attempt at different things. I like the new icon a lot, although I prefer some spheroid icons that were posted in blogzilla not too long ago.
I back up doug and dave on how hard the transition from ie to fb is. I was even considering writing an article/tutorial on how to change browser and readapt yourself to a different browsing environment. it’s plainly obvious that fb is so much better, but you’re so used to working around the awkwardnesses of ie, that fb just feels weird and not so straightforward at first time. although, past a couple of weeks indeed you never look back.
I too use Firebird as my main browser and IE for testing purposes. I’ve managed to switch over at least three of my friends to Firebird as well. It is truly a wonderful browser. There is only one thing that I’d like it to have that IE has; the ability to delete a history entry by selecting it and hitting delete.
As a side note, the missing scrollbars is due to some changes in how Firebird handles themes. You’ll need to find an updated version of the theme.
Congratulations to all concerned with the revamp of the Mozilla site and to Mozilla on the full suite release of upgrades.
However, Dave Shea implores us to preach Mozilla products and convince friends and relatives to change from IE.
In my opinion, until Mozilla make intalling and upgrading of their products as easy as Opera do then the general non “tech head” public will stick with what came in the box.
They dont want to visit forums or have to find an unofficial Firebird installer at Texturizer just to have a browser that some of us say is better.
Cheers
John
No offense to the great gardener, but is it just me, or does anyone else think the beta site is pretty ugly?
Tan, brown, grey, and purple, with a red lizard logo?
How about red as the accent color given that the logo is fixed, and go from there? Those are classic colors in the logo, red, black and white, why not use them?
Also, the header stretches across the whole page, while the rest is set to 800. Looks awkward. Maybe a max-width on the header? Or center the box? And make the header all one color with the logo in it?
Otherwise, great to see the direction of it.
I personally think the whole ‘bird bit is dumb. Mozilla is a fine name, just go with that. Far too confusing as-is. Obviously no one there has a clue about branding. They should switch now, why wait until 1.0?
Personally, I only use two extensions… SmoothWheel (which is a neat *smooth* scrolling extension for the wheel) and Tabbrowser Extension, which gives you greater control over the tabs and how they work. Those are the primary extensions I install right away, the others are just nifty goodies.
Firebird is really fantastic, and I’m impressed by the advances it has made continously. It has gotten to a point where I’m burning it onto a CD and passing it out amongst my family, so they don’t have the “it takes forever for me to update” excuse anymore. :)
Anthony: Anyone have any favorite extensions?
The list of extensions to which I’ve already become accustomed:
* Style Selector: Even though the latest version has an icon that appears on the left side of the status bar when alternate style sheets exist, this extension makes a small menu ever-present on the right side of the status bar, and can even specify “no page style” (another way to turn off style sheets)
* Copy Image: Allows copying images to the clipboard. For whatever reason, this feature was missing in Firebird 0.6. But, IMO, it’s absolutely necessary and should just be part the default install.
* EditCSS: A wickedly powerful little extension that shows the site’s CSS rules in a sidebar, and allows you to edit them and see changes in real-time. A little buggy for complex style sheets, but cool none-the-less.
* PNH Developers’ Toolbar and Web Developer: These each have their own advantages, but they overlap quite a bit in features, so try them both out. Chances are, if you need either, it will only be one of them.
* Hide Searchbar: I’ve found I don’t need the searchbar. I configured Firebird to use the location bar for a normal Google search instead of an “I feel lucky” search. If I ever need the searchbar, it’s available by hitting Ctrl + Shift + S. There are also Custom Keywords that can be used to set up any other types of searches from the location bar.
* Tabbrowser Extensions: Tab browsing on crack, for control freaks. No other description will do for this one.
* Link Visitor: One of the simplest, yet coolest extensions that lets you mark a visited link as unvisited, or vice versa. Useful for quickly testing CSS
:linkand:visitedpseudo-classes.I thought NewsMonster might be a promising RSS aggregator which embedded directly into the sidebar. But it seems too buggy in Firebird, and I can’t figure out how to completely hide it without disabling the extension entirely. So I don’t recommend it yet.
Never thought I’d actually change my default browser, but I did! And glad I did. Works well, and loads up faster than Moz 1.x and Netscape. A pity Internet Explorer is embedded into the Windows code. One of the main reasons people I know don’t swtich is due to the slower start-up.
I love the “Adblock” extension. I don’t actually use it only for ads now, I actually use it to block all the annoying blinking/moving graphics.
The Firebird site design is a little over the top with the flame theme.
People are talking about a new design of the Firebird site, but I can’t find any difference. This is all I see, and I did flush my cache…
Are you talking about something else?
skamp: Yes, Mozilla already replaced the first page of the Firebird site with the old (current?) design. From following some of the discussion on MozillaZine: Mozilla Firebird 0.7 Released, it looks like they caved to criticism at some point mid-day yesterday, and rolled the design back to an earlier version:
OK, OK. Initial feedback was mixed but now it seems the world sees the 0.7 site more suitable advertising a Mexican airline than a browser. Going back to the more tried-and-true 7/15 design. You can’t hit a home run every day of the week!
At least they’re honest about it, and have a sense of humor too.
If you look at this full-screen browsing page from the product tour I mentioned in the original entry, you’ll not only see the flaming header, but also an embedded screenshot that represents something close to what the Firebird home page looked yesterday morning. For the record, just in case they *also* change that page, here’s a screenshot [65K, .gif] of the original full-screen browsing page…
To me Mozilla is still the same gang of coders making brilliant products. But for anybody else I wonder what they think Mozilla is. Is it a browser? Is it a company? Will this redesigned website help? I’m not sure, I think Dave could have done better than this. It’s the same old mess only now it just looks better. And probably that was all he was allowed to do. It’s only a beta but it’s already looking like a missed opportunity. Remember that having any market share wasn’t their main goal in the past. That was up to Netscape. But now they have to start from scratch. Aesthetics alone isn’t going to save them. But I’m sure they know that, don’t they?
I would love to see Mozilla come out with some banner ads. I’d be glad to promote a great browser on my site and encourage people to switch to Mozilla.
Doug, I’m curious - do you use the default theme, or another?
Steven: I don’t really like the default theme. No offense to the original designer, but it’s not my taste. I downloaded and switched to Orbit Grey. I’ve used previous Orbit themes for Mozilla (proper), and like their style. If I had designed Orbit Grey, I would have lightened the icon backgrounds a bit to allow more contrast with the art inside, and created more differentiation between bookmark icons and *folders* of bookmarks. But what exists works for me. Here’s another screenshot [70K, .gif] of the theme applied to my copy of Firebird.
I use Mozilla since a while back as my default browser and I haven’t regretted that change at all. Just like Doug, I use the Orbit (Retro) theme instead of the defult theme. Why not have Orbit as the default theme in Moz/Firebird? That would let a first time user get that “wow” feeling that is sorely needed right now (especially in Firebird).
Even though Moz/Firebird are “geeky” browsers in that they work good, they shouldn’t appear to be “geeky” to a regular user.
Btw. the web site looks great.
Hey Doug, the link to the comparison chart is broken.
Of course, the original chart was marketing garbage anyway.
It was taken down because Opera users complained to Mozilla about all the errors. After two revisions, there wasn’t much of a comparison left, so it’s gone.
Thanks David — the entry is now updated with notes about the removed chart and roll-back of the Firebird front page design.
Dave, just saw your latest comments on your site about your constaints for the redesign, and that’s what I assumed. Hope my comments above were taken to be in the “constructive” category, as they were intended.
Not a problem. Your “why not use red, black and white?” got me thinking about a new path for the design that I hadn’t considered. Too late now, but something to file and keep in mind anyway.
I find Opera is better than Firebird (or any other browser, for that matter).
Firebird is simply too simple - it doesn’t have the usablity features that Opera has (yet it’s twice the size). Sure, it has loads of extensions, but most of them just fill in the features that should come built in and are required before it’s power-usable.
Their very own feature comparison site (once corrected) shows Opera’s dominance - Opera has 3 “No”s, and this is on a heavily Firebird-biased chart. Add some Opera bias to the chart, and Firebird’s apparent credit is drowned out in 10 “No”s.
Hope I don’t look like a troll.
I have to say I’m in agreement with those who think the new design could be better - it is certainly an improvement, but it doesn’t really impress or inspire a massive desire to try the software. The search box is also a little too faint against the background until mouseovered. For some reason this grates, although I couldn’t say why offhand. If I were to give an example of a website that had the right ‘feel’ to it that I’d hope for at Mozilla.org (at least for some of the little details) I’d say The Iconfactory had it pegged.
And by the way, for those wondering about the flaming Firebird website discussed earlier, it can still be seen at http://website-beta.mozilla.org/products/firebird/.
I went from Opera to Mozilla to Firebird on my PC and Mozilla to Camino to Safari on my Mac. I really liked a lot of what Opera had to offer at the time it was my default browser, however, the advertisements were sometimes inappropriate and often distracting—not to mention the annoyance of accidentally clicking on them. It took the same measures Doug mentioned earlier in breaking his IE habits to break my Opera habits, but I’m glad I did.
I just did a quick total and I have at least 6 browsers per machine (1 PC & 2 Macs)—I think that qualifies for a level of geekdom I might not be prepared to accept. Or neurosis. Heh.
If you’ve read this far down… Just a friendly reminder that while it’s interesting to read your comments about the Mozilla.org beta site design — and they’re certainly relevant given the fact I made a statement about the design in my original entry — please make sure you send also any of your feedback directly to the Mozilla.org team (webmaster@mozilla.org) to ensure all the right people get to see it.
I’m sure Mozilla is not lacking in people already sending feedback. Just be aware: posting any suggestions or criticisms here most likely won’t be seen by the right people.
(And yes, I’m changing my moniker to “Bowman”, so as not to confuse with other Doug’s who read or make comments here.)
I do use Firebird but on my Mac, my browser of choice is still Safari. I always keep a copy of Firebird close, especially when I’m designing a web page.
One thing I couldn’t live without is the wonderful Mac OS theme Pinstripe, at least now my browser LOOKS like it’s fitting with the OS :-)
the advertisements [in Opera] were sometimes inappropriate and often distracting
FWIW, Opera 7.2 now (optionally) has Google-served, page-sensitive, text-based ads. That’s if you don’t want to buy it.
Yeah I love Firebird. Thought I’d reply here and tell anyone that didn’t allready know, the reason the comparison chart was removed was because of compliants from Opera fans. They rallied around a single thread and I’m assuming spammed the Firebird team untill it was removed -
The thread that killed the chart
So after a long time reading entries here, I finally got around to actually posting a comment :D
Anyway, I’m with Kevin W. and others on this one. IMHO, Mozilla is neat, but too much. Firebird is neat, but too little. Opera is smaller than Firebird and offers functionality way beyond Mozilla. Apart from that, Opera has Håkon Wium Lie ;)
I must say, the one thing that I love the most most about Opera is it’s ability to surprise me—and I’m not talking surprise in an IE-“*surprise*, I crashed!”-kinda way. Just half an hour ago, I found out that Opera actually has a built in inline-find feature, which I thought it didn’t. I told a friend of mine about Opera and demonstrated some of it’s capabilities compared to Firebird, which he uses. He liked it very much, but needed the caret-browsing-ability offered in Firebird. He’ll hear from me today :)
After reading Opera’s mission and vision, I’ve just grown to love it even more. Opera truly is “Simply the best internet experience”.
I have become a disciple.
Joen, Firebird also has an “inline-find feature”.
Anyway, here’s the new site that was on the homepage for a day or so. The one described here. The beta site.
The search bar is incredibly useful, I can’t see how anyone can be efficiently productive without it. If I want to see a movie review, I hit the icon on the search bar, drop it to IMDB, then type the name of the movie. If I want to search Google UK, I do the same. Wikipedia, Amazon, InterNIC (for domain name searches), mySQL docs, and eBay are amongst other search options.
I can bring up the IMDB page for a movie, or the Amazon page where I can buy the movie, within seconds.. rather than browsing to the specific sites then doing a search there.
Damon (#48): Sorry if I was imprecise by comparing inline-find to caret browsing. I figure “,” (find links) in Opear compares to caret browsing and “.” is the right comparison for inline-find :)
I love Firebird. I’ve been using it since February when it was Phoenix 0.5. And it’s only gotten better since the real development has started to switch to firebird. So many extensions have been developed in the last few months. And this is the thing that other browsers are missing.
I mainly only use opera for testing, but once in a while I’ll browse some while I have it open. And in the little time that I use it, it crashes more than Firebird which I use all the time. And I even use firebird nightlies from time to time.
The search bar is awesome. I love middle clicking to open links in a new tab. I’ve even started using a simple RSS reader extension to keep up with blogs like this one.
What RSS reader extension is that, Brian? I’m interested in checking out some stuff like that. I didn’t recall seeing one in the Extensions list last time I visited, but if it was there, I’m being lazy, and just asking now *g*
That would be the RSS reader panel:
http://fls.moo.jp/moz/rssreader.html
And yes that extension list for firebird is getting quite large (113 extensions). They need to break it down into categories or something.
Make that 119 extensions.
And I don’t know if it’s just coincidence or what but the extension page now has the extensions broken down into categories like configuration, developer tools, navigation, etc….
Thank goodness
Firebird is the best. I can not stand IE and I refrain from using it whenever possible. In fact, I audible swear when some website is so MS specific (IE rendered in MS Word) that I can not access it in Firebird. Kudos to the dev team and the people behind them.
Comments no longer open for this entry.