REVIEW: Mozilla Firebird

by Gavin Henry

Introduction:

"Mozilla Firebird empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking and a number of other seamless innovations, Mozilla Firebird stands out ahead."

I have been using Firebird since version 0.6 and I have never looked back. Never have I had such a pleasant surfing experience.

Firebird weighs in at 9.8mb download, and only 28mb when extracted. You may be thinking that isn't that small, but I assure you, it's fast, configurable and a pleasure to use.

If you followed my HOWTO on apt, you will already have the necessary setup to download Firebird; simply

apt-get install MozillaFirebird

or

apt-get install mozilla-firebird

I have not installed Firebird this way, as I always grab the source and just extract it into my home dir. If you want to build your own rpm from a specfile, then following Thomas Chungs guide on rpmbuild, you can.

My favourite features:

• Very fast startup and page display time.
• Lots and lots of addons, called Extensions (Tools > Options > Extensions)
• Good community support
• Tabbed browsing
• Tabbed bookmark saving, with a tabbed homepage setting called "Use Current Pages" (see my homepage tabs).
• Popup blocking (Tools > Options > Web Features)
• Toolbar trimming and setup
• Nice sidebar
• Stopping annoying website features
• Integrated search bar, with history
• Great privacy settings
• Extensive keyboard shortcuts
• Common plugins available; PDF, Flash, Java (In the address bar type, about:plugins to see what is installed. See see my homepage tabs for a PDF example)
• Great documentation for FAQ and tips and tricks
• Small taskbars for more viewing area
• Loads of Themes (Tools > Options > Themes)
• Programability

Conclusion:

Check out my upcoming Mozilla Firebird Plugins Tutorial that uses FedoraNEWS.org's previous tutorials for installing a Java-plugin , a Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin and a Flash-plugin.

You owe to yourself to download this baby!! Not only is it OSS/Free, but the amount of addons you get and themes and settings and speed and speed and and and.....

You get the picture.

Well, that's it for now. For any comments or corrections, please e-mail me.