Mozilla Foundation renamed its next generation browser from Firebird to “Firefox” and has released version 0.8 (release notes). The new release features streamlined downloading, an installer for Windows users, a new Aqua theme for MacOS X users and numerous other improvements. On other XUL news, ThunderBird 0.5 was released and Lindows.com released the NVU 0.1 preview recently, a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML editor powered by Mozilla’s technologies.
FireFox 0.8 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
‘Firebird’ to ‘Firefox’?? This really sounds like some april 1st joke.
What’s going on! Stick with a well thought name. Mozilla group does this all the time. I don’t know how long will it take to get used to this new name.
Firefox is a nice name. There was indeed some confusion with the FireBird SQL database, and so I think that was a good move. Read here for more info:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html
Downloading takes a while to start (server overload?), but once you get it installed, it is FAST. This thing is probably quicker than Moz 1.6.
To elaborate: the page downloading and rendering is very quick.
Excellent first impressions
Doesn’t sound quite right.. Any guesses what 0.9 is gonna be called? Why not just name it MozillaLite? or something.
Woops.. hit submit too soon.. I’m looking forward to trying it out when it’s in FreeBSD’s ports.
This is definitely faster than firebird 0.7! Cant wait for 0.9
Now about about the movie name FireFox with Clint Eastwood? Art they going to change the name to “Terminator”. Wait, that one is alredy taken, dam.
Love the software. Please keep one name.
Nvu is a really nice piece of software for it’s first Beta release. It is much metter than the old mozilla composer, just in that it has tabs and a site manager. Things are really picking up for web development with linux. The first version of Quanta with WYSIWYG editing came out as part of KDE 3.2 last week, and NVU now as well.
Finally they have implemented multiple identities under a single account, I could never stand those dozens of inboxes, one for each account, taking up space and having to configure tons of filters to redirect everything to one single place…
I think it’s just silly…
Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox… try to guess the next one… :p
Why does cold starting Mozilla or Fire(Fox|Bird) feel like booting an operating system?
This really is /much/ faster then before. Wow…I’m at a loss for words. Some web browsers have been said to render pages so quickly that they “leap” to the page, but this is the first time I think that sounds appropriate. Very very wow.
I would like to jump from “HTML email composition” to “text mail composition” back and forth, and not have that *just* as a preference-panel option, but also as on the fly exchange. I do that a lot on Outlook Express and I really like that feature (of course my default is text mode but sometimes I want to send an HTML email, I should not have to go through the preference panel to enable HTML again, I should be able to change on the fly). The application lets me change on the fly from HTML to text from the menu, but not from text to HTML.
Another small annoyance is that when you click “address book” from a composition email, the focus of the window changes to the main window here (neither to the address book or the composition window).
And a bug: When I click to “view image” on a email with an embedded image (I have email images turned off, but there will be cases where I would actually want to see an image on a specific email, that’s why this option is there), but I get an XUL error message instead.
That’s all for now, just 5 minutes into using it. I am sure I will find more if I keep using it.
Hopefully they’ll stick with the name for good. The fox is pretty fitting. In any case, despite the name crazyness, I must say the new logo is awesome!
I’m very pleased they finally addressed two major issues in this release…lack of a decent Windows installer (made it hard to recommend as an alternative to IE for the average user when you have to manually install it) and the name conflict thing. Personally I think should have been a lot more careful before coming up with their previous two names. Honestly, how hard is it to google your name of choice before leaping into a project?
Good name and logo though. Hopefully both of these stick around awhile. Changing your official name every other release or so isn’t exactly my idea of an intelligent way to run a project.
Congrats though, can’t wait to try this out.
the logo is really nice…
the next name… hmmm… Fox You???
the download speed is pretty slow!!!!
i hope FireFox’s performance is worth the try
http://mozillazine.org/
They have been waiting until december to get the Firefox trademark approved. So the name will be staying
Just downloaded and installed it and I don’t get a scrollbar at any page ?!?
Also the Tools|Options… window was much clearer in 0.7
🙁
I wanted to install some extensions on my FireFox, but the Texturizer.net which hosts these extensions have deleted them from their servers.
…is a sweet name! I have a browser to go with a DVD on my shelf
hehe. Now if only the browser had the thought-controlled navigation like Eastwood’s FireFox….!
I have to agree with previous posters, it is quick, noticably more than 0.7
Nevermind, uninstalled the theme I was using and everything looks fine now.
I think it’s a nice name, goes with the whole mozilla red star logo as well
hopefully the IRIX build will be out in next couple of days 🙂
On that page, there are links to download for Linux, “Linux: GTK or GTK2 + XFT (no installer)”, the “GTK + XFT” one seems to point to Thunderbird 0.5 right now. Just a warning.
Erik
Much better than 0.7 speedwise. Looks great, works great, now my default browser instead of Moz 1.6
i’v put up an swedish mirror, http://lunxer.se/mozilla/
(only window files though)
Im pretty impressed with these new version.
I was waiting for this and checking the mozilla site almost daily since the release of Mozilla 1.6. Can’t wait to get off from work, go home and rediscover the web!:) I like the new Firefox icon, should fit well with the crystal icon theme. Since they built it on top of the mozilla 1.6 version, we can expect to see major speed improvements.
I hope more people will give it a try and fall in love with it, but I am concerned by the XP service pack 2. People are fed up with pop-ups, and if Microsoft is going to make IE pop-up proof, then less will be interested in changing/trying other browsers. Tabbed browsing or not, I think the lowest side of the browsing experience are the pop-ups. We should less focus on pop-up blocking and “advertise” Mozilla/Firefox as the SECURE browsers. Microsoft tries to address the pop-up issue by making IE cope with that, but they will never be able to advertise their browser as secure. Far too many holes are exposed every week/month.
Edited by the Admin: Please stay on topic and cut out the annoying “signatures” in capitals. If you have questions or a problem, email the osnews team, don’t reply here.
@blegh: why bother? i enjoy my firefox and it isent going to be better if everyone uses it over ie, let ppls be stupid and use ie, dont try to convert them, they will just come back and complain about some little thing.
it is an iterative naming concept… i predict it is going to end as “fox force five”
I’m not impressed…
Firebird/Firefox just isn’t there yet. I still find Mozilla to be the most suitable for my needs. In fact, I found a nasty problem in Firefox on one of the forums I go to… When I click “submit” it doesn’t submit and it opens another browser window?? ugh!!!
I can see if this was a nightly build, but for a final release 0.8 just doesn’t cut it. It looks like they rushed it out the door because everyone kept asking where it was.
So I think I’ll just stick with Mozilla until Firefox actually works as well as Mozilla.
It doesn’t even start here (Panther)!
Excellent new release. I recommend using the adblock extension for blocking banners. Simple (and actually fun) to set up.
But it seems it only works with extensions that are made explicitly for FireFox (at least that’s the impression i get from the info in the installation instructions) so I’ll wait until mouse gestures are released to work with it – I go nuts browsing without them now.
no it works with the old firebird extensions fine, go and download it, its a great release. it has replaced Opera on my desktop.
> Doesn’t sound quite right.. Any guesses what 0.9 is gonna be called? Why not just name it MozillaLite? or something.
they already stick with “Firefox”, no change.
btw, “Mozilla” is not an actual product name, it’s a kind of umbrella name (Mozilla Seamonkey, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc)
Why does cold starting Mozilla or Fire(Fox|Bird) feel like booting an operating system?
Every time I need to look at a PDF in Acrobat Reader I make the joke that I’m “starting the Adobe Operating System”. Mozilla, with all its API and Object Model stuff almost is an operating system 😉
No doubts. But only the Windows edition. Linux edition has some annoying bugs like the delayed menu rendering.
Kenjin wrote:
I think it’s just silly…
Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox… try to guess the next one… :p
————————————————————–
Perhaps “Flaming Beagle” or “Sparking Muskrat.”
Love the software…hate the name game they are playing.
– I don’t HAVE TO use an installer, I just unpack Firebird wherever the heck I want to
– The Firefox installer is broken: try to install into c: emfirefox. Yep, you can’t, except if you create the directory yourself, beforehand.
– Firefox is not able to reload automatic proxy configuration files, unlike Firebird!
– Firefox is slower ins startup, while all other characteristics are the same
– Firefox did not fix any of my concerns with Firebird (trackpoint support, some javascript news-tickers not displaying correctly etc.)
So, I already uninstalled it. Thanks for nothing, Firefox.
I bet that for every person that likes a Windows installer you will find an equal number of people that preferes simple archives that you can unpack where you want.
I bet that for every person that likes a Windows installer you will find an equal number of people that preferes simple archives that you can unpack where you want without generating the installer registry entries.
Good to hear people are working on a Linux WYSIWYG editor. The only thing I hope is that it will produce clean code and will be able to handle XHTML. HTML 4 is the past, NVU ‘d better take into account that form should be separated from content in well-designed webpages.
Anyway, I’m sure this will soon be equally good as Frontpage, perhaps also Dreamweaver. And despite I’m not a big fan of the Lindows OS, they are definitely doing good work in this respect. I like their philosophy of bringing Linux to the masses.
It’s the cleanest browser I’ve used. Fast, minimalist screen furniture and effective nobbling of websites that exude popups or resize browser windows. It’s all I need. I hope the death rattle of blubberware continues to be resisted.
While I can understand the reasons for renaming Firebird to Firefox, I can’t understand why Lindows picked Nvu… how do you pronounce that? Noveau? En-vue? I can just imagine saying “I use the new WYSIWYG editor from Lindows, it’s great… it’s called err… nnnnvuuu.”
According to this: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html, firefox is another name for one of these: http://www.binderparkzoo.org/BPZ%20Photo%20Gallery-Red%…
When I first mentioned it, my girlfriend hated the name. Now she loves it.
“While I can understand the reasons for renaming Firebird to Firefox, I can’t understand why Lindows picked Nvu… how do you pronounce that? Noveau? En-vue? I can just imagine saying “I use the new WYSIWYG editor from Lindows, it’s great… it’s called err… nnnnvuuu.”
Accordign to the webpage its called quite simple: “new-view” -> but hey you really have to know this
Is that all you folks really have to your life? To complain about the name changes? Did you even read the article Eugenia posted?
Why change the name?
To avoid overlap. The colloquial name “Firebird” is also in use by another open source project. While we don’t believe our use of the Firebird name infringed on their trademark, we wanted to be responsive to the concerns of fellow open source developers.
Sheesh… Its spelled out there in black and white (and red
). How about you actually try the software? It is amazingly fast…
Kudos to the Mozilla team… Nice work.
For the next feature, please add spell checking to forms!
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_…
Does anyone know when they will be dropping gecko from Thunderbird?
Personally, I don’t think that HTML has any place in email. You want HTML use a web browser. It’s one heck of a security hole, spammer’s and other marketers just love it, and it just bloats email to many times the size it needs to be. The first thing I do when I install Thunderbird is turn off HTML rendering, strip HTML code, and set it so that I never generate HTML emails.
That aside, since I already have Firebird (soon to be Firefox) installed, why should I carry around two copies of gecko? For those people that live under the misguided belief that email needs HTML, gecko should be available as an optional install if you don’t have Mozilla or Firefox, and link against it if you do.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
someone247356
I hope they don’t get rid of this section under the “Options”. I have no way of trusting MS’s SSL implementation when I’m testing out certs.
at first, it was Phoenix (Mozilla Phoenix),
to show that this browser is a rewritten one, not just a modified version of Mozilla Seamonkey.
(Phoenix is a bird that born from fire, and once it dead it can reborn again from fire. something like that)
with some reason, may be name conflicts,
it changed to Firebird.
(try to keep it related to Phoenix)
then (another) name conflicts,
this time with Firebird SQL (based on Borland InterBase)
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/.
so it now changed to Firefox.
(try to keep it related to Firebird)
it’s a good name.
and i like that panda
At last, NVU! I hope it’ll be as good as dreamweaver soon. Dreamweaver is a bit slow and bugger under wine. When it doesn’t crash.
I mean buggy of course
You would think that before mozilla developers named a project they would make use of a tool I am SURE they have heard of:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=firebird+sof…
Firebird SQL on the first page….
There are some really bright people who are really, really dense sometimes
Very very dumb from the people there. Phoenix was forgiveable. Firebird? Well I remember at the time they said “no no, no conflict with the database, it’s all fine.”
And here we are a few months down the track and they’ve changed it again.
It just makes the whole thing look amateurish. Very unimpressive.
I just had a quick install of the browser and… well I’m going to leave it there for further use but it hasn’t won be back to Firexxxx from Opera.
As to Thunderbird though, I’ve been using that as my regular mail client since 0.2 I think so I’m looking forward to giving it a go.
Eugenia:
There’s no need to dig into the preference panel to switch between plain text and HTML e-mails. Shift-clicking the ‘Write’ button brings up an HTML mail if the default is plain text, and vice versa.
I agree it would be nice if it were possible to switch between the two on the fly (from within the mail composition window), though.
“When I click “submit” it doesn’t submit and it opens another browser window?? ugh!!!”
OK people, let’s learn to pay attention to our version numbers. 1.0 version means a final release. Firefox is now at version 0.8, which means it is BETA software. If you do not understand what BETA software is and what that means, perhaps you should not be installing or playing around with it.
Nvu doesn’t come close to Dreamweaver as far as features goes. But for being v0.1 and free it’s really sweet. It’s a bit slow on this box (400mhz) but it’s quite usable. I will start using it for webdevelopment from now on and see how it goes.
The CSS editor looks great, I hope it works well too because that would certainly speed up my working process.
Thumbs up!
And Firefox seems to work really well so far. I like the new download manager, it is somewhat like the one in NetPositive and I’ve been wanting that for quite some time.
Does anyone else see a problem with the way a lot of open source applications are named? The names make no sense, are totally unrelated to function.
It pains me to say this but Internet Explorer is a very good name for a web browser. Netscape Navigator is a decent name.
But to the average computer user, the type of person we are trying to attract to linux and open source, names like galeon, firebird, mozilla, firefox, konqueror, epiphany, are not easy to remember and are likely to confuse.
It’s also quite silly to keep renaming projects, it looks quite amateurish.
My submit buttons are working just fine actually. Also, beautiful new logo, fast pages, wonderful thus far! Good going Mozilla Team! Keep up the good work.
So what’s with the user profile thing? I thought they where going to get rid of that thing in OSs that don’t need it (like Windows XP).
It’s kind of an annoying extra feature that only makes it so that I cannot run multiple concurrent versions of mozilla at the same time without making a hundred extra profiles (which I would love to do for testing purposes).
Does anyone else see a problem with the way a lot of open source applications are named? The names make no sense, are totally unrelated to function.
It pains me to say this but Internet Explorer is a very good name for a web browser. Netscape Navigator is a decent name.
But to the average computer user, the type of person we are trying to attract to linux and open source, names like galeon, firebird, mozilla, firefox, konqueror, epiphany, are not easy to remember and are likely to confuse.
It’s also quite silly to keep renaming projects, it looks quite amateurish.
Agreed 100%. Love the software…hate the name game they are playing.
Because the “good” names are already trademarked?
Good release. Love the new name, logo and speed of this product. At first I though “Oh no, not another name change” … but I can see why and after 10 minutes of using the browser and looking at the name I can tell I won’t have any trouble adjusting.
Just so they don’t change it again …
Is the mozilla site down or is it just me? I can access the website at all.
But to the average computer user, the type of person we are trying to attract to linux and open source, names like galeon, firebird, mozilla, firefox, konqueror, epiphany, are not easy to remember and are likely to confuse.
How stupid do you think people are really? You seem like a microsoft employee to me. “Let’s assume that our users are practially braindead”
People only need to find out which app they need to browse the web and then they’ll know. It’s a simple as that.
For anyone who has never used a computer “Internet Explorer” isn’t that obvious, but it has become a household name, practically everyone knows what it is.
You are clearly underestimating peoples ability to think, reflect and remember.
I can’t get the navigation buttons (forward&back) to show up on OSX Panther. Downloaded 0.8 from the Oregon mirror. Trying another now. Anyone else using it on OSX?
I made the mistake of running the installer while I had Mozilla 1.5 downloading the lastest Thunderbird. The FoxFire installer closed down Mozilla including the downloader. That was a lot of fun halfway through my download at 26.4k.
Use the mirrors : http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html
I really think that finding them is not obvious for the first-come downloader : I had to google “ftp.mozilla.prg mirrors” to find them!
Sorry… even the mirrors page is heavily loaded 🙂
Here’s a FTP mirror : ftp://sunsite.rediris.es/pub/mozilla.org/
I don’t see why people go all out because of the name change.. i mean… obviously, you’ve all figured out that the name changed, and you’re still gonna be able to get the software…
Yeah, seems that mozilla website is down
Yeah… Because Outlook really tells you that its an email/calendar/task manager program…
I do, however, agree with your point. That’s why I like the psuedo standarand KDE uses: KMail, KAddressBook, KWord, KSpread, etc, etc, etc. The names key you into what the function. Not only that, but they key you into what platform they are for (K, as in the K Desktop Enviroment). Very handy, and newbie friendly, I’d say.
—–
Kick
http://ktd.sytes.net <– Donkies can’t spell
Did I miss a setting in the prefs or is there absolutely no syntax coloring in NVU ?
That kills it right there. This thing sucks. Unless I missed how to turn it on ?
Hmm…I’d like to dl this thing and use it but of course everything is swamped. Is there a bittorrent for firefox anywhere???
There’s no syntax coloring yet afaik. It’s version 0.1 and they are focusing on other things. But that doesn’t mean that it sucks. It just isn’t usuable to you yet.
Yep:
http://66.90.75.92/torrents/1128/firefox08.torrent
There’s no syntax coloring yet afaik. It’s version 0.1 and they are focusing on other things. But that doesn’t mean that it sucks. It just isn’t usuable to you yet.
True enough.
somone call me when a 1.0 release makes a debut.
It starts up fine for me with Panther. No navigation button problems…no problems at all yet.
“I think it’s just silly…
Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox… try to guess the next one… :p”
It will be Mozilla by the end of the year.
Anyway the name is better than Firebird because it is not a car’s name or the name of another software project and because it indicates speed.
That intelligent animals like yourselves can get confused between a database and a web browser.
Kinda funny how version 0.8 was out for BeOS for a little while now.
/usr/local/nvu/nvu-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
It seems my installation has every version of libstdc++ EXCEPT .so.3; I have .so.2.7.2, .so.2.8.0, .so.2.7.2.8, .so.2.8, .so.2.9, .so.5, .so.5.0.3…
Sheesh, now I have to dig up yet another version of libstdc++… it shouldn’t be this hard, guys.
thunderfox maybe?
“Sheesh, now I have to dig up yet another version of libstdc++…”
You don’t necessarily have to get another version of libstdc++:
cd /usr/lib
ls libstdc++*
This will show what version(s) of libstdc++ you have installed
Once you know the version you have installed, make a symlink from what you have installed to the version that Nvu needs:
ln -sf libstdc++-version-installed libstdc++-Nvu-needs
ln -sf libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 libstdc++.so.5.0.3
or something similar. You can also link to the libstdc++ version included with OpenOffice, should you happen to have that installed.
“it shouldn’t be this hard, guys.”
Agreed
do a symlink to your .so.5 and it will just work
Once you know the version you have installed, make a symlink from what you have installed to the version that Nvu needs
Beat you to it, but thanks all the same 🙂
Now let’s hope .so.5 is actually compatible with .so.3 🙂
should ofcourse have been Thundercat !
“should ofcourse have been Thundercat !”
The Browser Formerly Known As Something Else
I can easily say that firebird was the best browser already, but this one just blew my mind. It is definitely far more better than any other browser out there. I didn’t like the name change, cause I get used to Firebird now, but anyway, I think this is just amazing. People should definitely be using this browser, not any other. Nothing can come close to this browser. Every detail is very well thought and yet it is not even 1.0.
I am glad I have spent so many hours trying to make my apps work in mozilla.
I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this, but my the control panel for the font preferences really had trouble dealing with my large numbers of fonts. The only way I could scroll the options list was with the keyboard.. Then going into the same control panel a second time served me up with a completely disfunction bunch of form elements. None of the Option lists popped up any sort of list at all.
And uck! the font handling seems to have regressed back to netscape 6 behavior with improperly sized text, with words bleeding off the edges of divs and not being placed anywhere near where the cursor says they are.
The rest of the browser looks pretty amazing though.
Sounds good, I like the new logo. Anyone know if yT plans to help port this to BeOS?
Did anyone notice this at the Nvu site?
http://www.nvu.com/landing_page.html
It’s good until February 24th.
the German comedian Helge Schneider and his band
“Helge and the Firefuckers”
IMHO Firefox as a name sucks,
I mean who mistakes Mozilla Firebird for the Firebird database (before the name issue came up I didn’t even know about that one, and I still don’t know WHAT it is exactly just now)??
BTW it was supposed to be called just Mozilla Browser in the future anyway…
If you call it Firefox(the experimental “soviet” mig) in the movie of the same name.. then I guess you call the mail/news client, “Airwolf”
they are running into problems over this?
Kinda funny how version 0.8 was out for BeOS for a little while now.
Yeah, hilarious considering that it was a nightly build not an official release.
I can’t get the navigation buttons (forward&back) to show up on OSX Panther. Downloaded 0.8 from the Oregon mirror. Trying another now. Anyone else using it on OSX?
I had the same problem on the Windows version until I removed all traces of Firebird 0.7 first.
BeOS builds aren’t official releases anyhow. We’ve talked bout this in beshare. We ain’t on the cd they have for sale either.
Indeed, this version is smokin’ fast!
Keep up the great work Mozilla developers even if you are having issues coming up with a usable name, we won’t hold it against ya.
-GG
yep, it’s so kind of them to try to hook people up with 4.5 right before the release of 5
it’s a good marketing technique though, they work on their “good guys” status while they are at it as well.
they give it away at deviantart as well.