I’ve been testing and using Mozilla’s Firebird browser for the past few weeks. Many of you know I’m a browser freak, using four or five different browsers on a whim – but sticking primarily with IE6 – the “de facto standard”.
I’m ready to say that you should go out and download Firebird. It’s really that good. It’s not an official production version just yet, but the 0.6 release is incredibly stable and really much better than anything else out there for the Windows platform.
Yes, the Netscape/Microsoft wars are over, but – if Firebird stays on track – it may not be long before another browser war breaks out.
Words that make a web designer weep… Standard. All I want is a single browser standard. Is that too much to ask?
Here’s a few additional links that have great info on Firebird, all from adot’s notblog, a great resource in & of itself:
David Tenser’s Firebird Help
Ben Goodger’s Reasons to Switch
Minh Truong’s 10 incredible Mozilla Firebird features (and how to use them)
Make sure you have a recent version of glibc if you are running Linux. Firebird won’t run on my ancient Red Hat 6.1 box at work. (Mozilla runs just fine, though.)
well…duh…glibc… (???)
Firebird is pretty cool. Right now OS X people, like myself, are kinda lucky right now. We have Camino and Firebird, both Moz based, as well as Safari, KHTML based. All three are very standards based. I do a lot of surfing and 99% of pages display correctly in all three browsers. The miscreants misbehave in all three, but usually will show up in Mac IE. Firebird is still a little clunk on OS X but its much “lighter” than the whole Mozilla package.
I downloaded Firebird a week ago, and have already made it my default browser. I generally try to look at all the different sides of an issue, but I really can’t see why anyone would want to stick with IE after trying Firebird. It’s just one hell of a good, fast browser. If you love popups, stick with IE–otherwise get Firebird.