Mozilla Gains Popularity over Inernet Explorer and Outlook

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/
Mozilla has recently been taking over the Internet scene with its producs, Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, both gaining in popularity. More and more users have been finding that their easy to use interfaces, and advanced features such as Tab-Browsing to get rid of having multiple IE windows open at a time (My personal favorite), and a flawless pop up remover. There are many themes, plugins, and extensions available for these programs. I suggest you head over to www.Mozilla.com and check them out for yourself.

You can read why you should switch to these programs:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/ For Firebird
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/ Also for Firebird
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ for Thunderbird

You can also read some great online articles from Joel and also Jon Udell
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20030601.html Joel
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/02.html Jon Udell

There are many other programs that Mozilla has to offer, I have begun to switch over to them and have never looked back! I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
24,717 views 47 replies
Reply #2 Top
Ya, they have some that are on the Mozilla Themes page, and they do look fairly good. But I'd love to see some skinners get involved with the program... If anyone knows a page with some good Mozilla themes, please post link
Reply #3 Top
I'm glad to see this getting the attention and exposure it deserves. I have come to really like and appreciate the browser and it is ideal for testing web development for conforming to standards.

Thanks for putting this news item out there.
Reply #4 Top
I really haven't had the lust to try Mozilla out. I use MyIE2. So damn great. You can even save the flash movies you stream, that's so awesome. It's a tab browser as well, with cookie and pop-up/pop-under block, and it's skinnable too, with quite a few skins to it already.
Reply #5 Top
" now to wait for the themes to flood the internet. been using this for some time"

I love Firebird too, but I don't think this will happen. Skinning with CSS is a major pain! I've played with it some and skinning Mozilla/Firebird makes editing a sendmail.cf look like childs play. Unfortunately, until someone writes a decent gui, I don't think we'll see any sort of explosion in themes for these browsers.
Reply #6 Top
Firebird rules

In regards the skins their are lots already available and their is a link in the default bookmarks supplied with Mozilla Firebird.
http://texturizer.net/firebird/themes/

And their is also the god of Firebird skins Lynchknot
http://home.comcast.net/~lynchknot/phoenix.html

And Mozillazines own themes forums
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=18&sid=a6fbb54e0bf7640c69f562b2169d4f5c

Reply #7 Top
I've been using Mozilla products including Firebird and Thunderbird for a while now. One drawback with Firebird which I can't get resolved is logging onto Wincustomize. I keep getting an error re cookies which even after following the on screen instructions, does not resolve itself. I'm having better luck with Opera !!!
Reply #8 Top
I've never had a problem with logging in with Firebird and wincustomize (even when using the nightly builds), infact I dont even go anywhere near IE anymore with the excpetion of windows update (which usually consits of fixes for bugs in IE. )

A common problem people make is when trying out different versions of Firebird is they forget to delete the profile folder in documents and settings,so it can cause trouble for Firebird if your using the profile from another copy of the program and not a newly generated one.

Something also to take into account is that Mozilla Firebird is still a work in progress project despite it's great advances it's only at 0.7 and the final release of 1.0 is not expected till some time next year.
Reply #9 Top
If only the fact that most pages that use layers and such were designed for Ie and look wonky as hell with anything else I am forced to use IE but I have Mozilla installed and use it for standard browsing.

Reply #11 Top
I used to stick with IE, because that some pages didn't look right. But now there are more and more pages that use alpha-blended PNG images, and they need something else than IE.

Now I love Firebird because of the tabs, the simple google search feature, and the "auto-download" feature.

Also, it is good when the web browser is *not* integrated into the system. Makes me feel safer.
Reply #12 Top
I use MyIE2 too. I don't think there's a major difference between Mozilla and MyIE2, but I've seen the preview movie for 3D Browser or Browser3D... something like that and it's pretty awesome because of the 3D tabs and stuff.
Reply #13 Top
Who cares about Themes when the default Firebird theme goes with everything? ^.^

I've recently gotten into playing around with the user.js, userContent.css and userChrome.css files too. I'm in love. There isn't a -single- facet of Firebird that you can't tweak, edit, or completely change through simple editting (Okay, the editting is simple, but the context isn't. It's not /that/ hard though,) of a few files.

Don't like icons in your bookmarks menu? Fine, get rid of them. Want folders to show up a different colour? Yep, no problem. Menus in your menubar that you never use? Simply tell Firebird not to display those.

And... most importantly - using the examples given on the Firebird site, you can get rid of those /awful/ bevels on the pull down menus, and give them a better look.

And userContent.css based ad blocking! Seems to work a bit slicker than the AdBlock extension.
Reply #14 Top
One thing Firebird has over Opera for sure is the price... its free. Sure there is a free version of Opera, but it has ugly ads in it. Still I've tried Opera on several occasions and it has been too clunky for my tastes.
I was on the MyIE2 bandwagon for quite some time, but I defected quite easily to Firebird intially for the reason that it had the features I wanted, but more importantly I could skin it without it interferring with Windowblinds. MyIE2 doesn't get along well with WB when it comes to using MyIE2 skins.
Reply #15 Top
I used Opera for a while and got used to the mouse guestures feature. Do any of these other browsers include that? Is there a plugin for IE that will allow them? Opera just wasn't stable for some reason.
Reply #16 Top
Ok, a few people have mentioned how SOME (few) sites must still be viewed in IE. There is a great plugin for Firebird that allows you to right click a link and it will open the site in IE. THe link for that is here http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/#ieview I think its excellent. I also love the session saver, allowing you to save all the windows or tabs that you had open at the time you saved the session.

I can never see myself going back to IE. And I have viewed MyIE2 and I just think that Mozilla is a bit quicker, and more user friendly especially for new users. There are so many advanced features/ plugins that can later be installed for the advanced folks out there. Also everyone should check out THunderbird too. As somene stated, these programs are NOT installed to your pc. They run from a folder, (which I personally place in the C://My Programs folder so that I always know where it is. Thunderbird is great in that aspect because you can load it onto a USB FlashDisk, or portable USB or Firewire drive, and then get your email on any pc you want. My uncle is a lawyer, and he does this going back from home to his lawfirm everyday...
Reply #17 Top
Mozilla Firebird supports mouse gestures by way of a plugin - simple to install, by the way.
Reply #20 Top
Put mouse gestures in Google and see what results.
OK, I'll make it easy this is the first link that comes up in Google, you should check it out, given the news topic you posted here:
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/
Reply #21 Top
I dunno why people complain about the interface in opera. It's so simple to customize everything. and the myopera community has some damn fine skins there
Reply #22 Top
Something about the overall 'feel' of Opera always had me running away from it after about 10-15 minutes of using it. I can't quite explain it. Firebird, however, is sheer browsing bliss (especially when you turn on pipelining (well it helps w/servers that support it,) and disable the default delay before rendering a page.

Firebird's all of the good of Mozilla, without the general crappiness (bloaty crashiness,) of it.
Reply #23 Top
eh... I found firebird to be too light.. but as a proof of concept one of the opera dev team came up with this
http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/huginmunin.html
Reply #25 Top
Firebird is amazingly stable and robust for a 0.7ver release.

I have been using it for about 2 months and have no reason to return to IE.