Firebird
As noted previously, the administrative interface provided by my hosting service does not play nicely with Safari or IE/Mac. They suggested Mozilla Firebird. I finally decided to cave, and give it a try.
I think I like it. That’s really saying something, considering I’ve never seen a Mozilla browser I liked. From the early Netscapes onward, I’ve always thought they were ugly and slow. Mozilla 1.0 became usable, but not really comfortable. Firebird (I’m using the 0.6.1 build) feels alot different.
It’s still rough around the edges. Scratch too hard and you will see the mozilla underpinnings. In the Mac OS X version, if you close all windows, the menus all change… to what look like Mozilla menus. Even the Mozilla properties dialog, which Firebird normally replaces with a much slimmer version, returns when all the windows are closed. And when I tried to install the Windows version on my office PC (Win2K), it crashed. Repeatedly. I finally gave that up.
But this is only a 0.6x build… its supposed to be rough. It’s got some very nice features. Tabbed browsing is on par with Safari. The ‘extensions’ feature reminds me of Blosxom… There seem to be lots of extensions available already (this may be a general Mozilla feature). And of course, the CSS rendering is great.
All in all, so far so good. I might even make it my default browser. If I can ever figure out how to customize the keyboard shortcuts, I will. For some unknown reason ‘Backspace’ is only a shortcut for ‘Back’ in the Windows version. Why not make the Mac ‘Delete’ key do the same thing? Until then, I still find myself in Safari less and less.
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