Mozilla Firebird

dgrant · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 6:40 am Post subject: Mozilla Firebird

I don't get what the big deal is with Mozilla Firebird. It's no faster than Mozilla, it looks the same as mozilla except for the icons, which is just a theme called Qute, and I haven't checked, but I'm sure it's available for Mozilla. The preferences menu looks great, and it has auto-completion of forms, but other than that, I don't really see any big difference.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is overrated and overhyped. I mean does it really deserve to have every release announced on Slashdot? Everyone seems to rave about it's speed, but it's still Gecko, and the speed is the same. I guess the footprint will be smaller (eventually, although I've yet to see this, at least when I tried it in Windows, 0.5 mind you..)

mile_slo · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 8:20 am Post subject: Re: Mozilla Firebird

progster · Apprentice Joined: 16 Jul 2002 Posts: 271

for me firebird (or mozilla browser like it's supposed to be called now), starts up way faster then mozilla and it doesn't have all the bloatware I don't use... that's a personal opinion of course.

~Progster

nrl · Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 446 Location: Glasgow, UK

jimlynch11 · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:14 pm Post subject:

i agree with above posters. firebird is alot quicker on the load for me, and seems to be a hair faster in navigating pages as well. that combined with the lack of bloat (although removeable as suggested above) makes it ideal for alot of users...

bashir · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:19 pm Post subject:

Why do you think Phoenix/Firebird/MozillaBrowser is not faster than Mozilla :?:

IMHO it is a lot faster - especially at startup :!:

bashir

Raoul_Duke · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:22 pm Post subject:

I have both mozilla (with no bloat) and firebird installed..........firebird is slightly quicker becuase it uses the native gtk toolkit and not the excellent but slower XUL

Firebird is very good but iMHO it still needs to mature before i switch from mozilla full-time. looking forward to it though :wink:

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dgrant · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:25 pm Post subject:

Startup is a bit faster. Perhaps some things are faster like clicking on things in the UI seem to respond faster. But overall, the rendering of pages is still as slow as Mozilla. I've always found Gecko sluggish. Once you use Opera you realize how slow Mozilla is. Actually IE6 also is faster, similar to Opera. Personally Mozilla is still way better than Opera though for othe reasons.

I just measured the startup speed. Firebird definitely saves a few seconds. But once you surf a few web pages, that advantage is lost.

duff · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2002 Posts: 466 Location: Clemson, SC

Raoul_Duke · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:41 pm Post subject:

Sorry, my bad :oops:

Just got me confused because it seems to follow whatever gtk theme i'm using

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dgrant · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 12:46 pm Post subject:

Why does the Mozilla team make a point of saying they are not deprecating it? Is it a candidate for deprecation or something?

choco · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2003 Posts: 49 Location: Jackson, MI

The Mozilla team probably makes a point about it not because XUL is a candidate for deprecation but because many people deprecate it already. Other browsers for Linux like Galeon, etc., use Mozilla's rendering but replace the XUL gui with a native one like gtk, in order to at least make the browser's GUI more responsive. The Mozilla team may be emphasizing that XUL isn't a problem, so it isn't the reason for the change to the slimmer Firebird.
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sgaap · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 3:33 pm Post subject:

I have mozilla 1.4b and firebird from (recent) cvs, while mozilla is sluggish from time to time, firebird-cvs is extremly fast, even faster than konqueror when using kde, so just use the cvs version, it kicks ass

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pizen · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 3:45 pm Post subject:

dgrant · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 3:52 pm Post subject:

In what specific aspect does Firebird have a noticeable speed improvement over Mozilla?

BTW, the fastest Mozilla I have used are the Mozilla nightly builds. They beat the Debian package (compiled with -O2) as well as the Gentoo package hands down. Marking my 2000 message Junk mail folder as spam or non-spam for example, takes about 30 seconds in the Gentoo and Debian package, but only 15 seconds with Mozilla nightly build. There are all on identical versions by the way, Moz 1.3. BTW, startup time on mozilla nightly is about 4 seconds, which is the same as Firebird for me. Mozilla 1.3 Debian or Gentoo package is 7 or 8 seconds (slow!).

I think maybe part of the problem is it all depends what package you are using. However, I can conclude that thus far, Mozilla nightly binaries from the mozilla web page have so far been just as fast as any Firebird I've tried so far. Although I haven't tried many different kinds of Firebird. For example I haven't tried CVS as someone suggested.

Xargon · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 4:59 pm Post subject:

What exactly are the differences between Firebird and Phoenix?

Also (this may be something obvious), how do I emerge Firebird when it is masked? (I have "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86" in my /etc/make.conf file.)
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pizen · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 5:10 pm Post subject:

tfoggoa · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 5:31 pm Post subject:

A better question: How to I upgrade from phoenix to firebrid?

I have a couple of customer search applet things in the search bar too.

Can I just emerge firebird overtop of phoenix? How does portage handle when an ebuild gets renamed?

-Todd

Diezel · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 5:52 pm Post subject:

Due to theese discussions even I emerged Firebird and I'm truly amased. It's "greased lightning" :lol:

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Munck · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 7:22 pm Post subject:

tfoggoa:

When I upgraded, I did:

emerge unmerge mozilla-firebird-bin

emerge mozilla-firebird

cheers!
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echeslack · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 7:36 pm Post subject:

dgrant · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2003 7:59 pm Post subject:

I'm still not a believer. One of the real tests I noticed for Mozilla and Firebird is to create a bunch of tabs, and then switch between them. I have an Athlon 1.2 GHz, 513MB RAM, 32MB GeForce2, and I notice a slight delay when switching between open tabs, and this delay is there on firebird as well as mozilla. Should I try firebird-cvs? will it make much difference?

p.s. Thanks Ewen for that tip! That might be part of the mystery I think.

markfl · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2003 7:33 am Post subject:

where is user.js? i cant find it anywhere.....
probably mind numbingly obvious
thanks
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Zephaniah · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2003 9:14 am Post subject:

it doesn't exist by default. You create it at

~/.phoenix/default/XXXXXX.slt/user.js

where XXXXXX is a directoy under the .phoenix directory, eg mine's called u0khqws0.slt, yours could be different(?).

thats for firebird 0.6 btw, dont know why the directory is still called phoenix though.

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

I downloaded a binary of Mozilla firebird for Mac OS X a few days ago. All I can say is wow! I have used all the mac browsers on 10.1.5 (IE, Mozilla, Camino, Omniweb, Opera). On the Mac I have yet to find a browser until Firebird that actually works decently. Every browser has its quirks for OS X: IE is carbon therefore it is slow, and getting bookmark compatibility is hell (imagine that); mozilla was slow in the GUI (XUL I presume) and fonts were nasty; Camino is by far the buggiest browser and possible application that I have <b> ever used</b> on a computer (I wish the project luck and have filed several bug reports). I never really was much of a fan of opera and Omniwebs cocoa interface isn't that nice IMHO. I tried Firebird a while back when it was first released for the mac, and it was hardly usable then. All the problems that I experience then have been eradicated in this release, such as scrolling problems (text bleeding vertically when i scrolled). The only thing I don't like about firebird is the preferences menu because the sidebar is pictures. I prefer the old mozilla style with captions/drop arrows. This is a great browser to try. It's now my main browser in Mac OS 10.1.5. Try it!