In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org Asa discusses the formation of the the Mozilla Foundation, the direction Mozilla is headed, Microsoft’s decision to no longer offer IE as a standalone product, acceptance of the browser as a client interface to applications and more. Additionally, Mozilla 1.5A, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 and Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 were released recently.
Interview with Asa Dotzler of Mozilla
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have tested most of the modern browsers available for WindowsXP and find Mozilla Firebird to be the best of them all, now when 99% of the websites works. IE isn’t bad at all but lacks important features as “TABBED BROWSING!” and “POP UP BLOCKING”.
But Mozilla Firebird isn’t as good on Linux and MacOS as it is on Windows. The Linux-builds is built using GTK+ version 1 and got much slower response than under Windows.
If you are using Windows and IE as default browser, do yourself a favour and download and try Mozilla Firebird today!
Mozilla and Mozilla Firebord may be better than it used to be but I still prefer IE because of it’s user interface, rendering and general absense of problems. Mozilla’s redering is highly annoying as stuff jumps around when loading. It’s good as an backup browser though. I live happily without the feature “TABBED BROWSING!” (there exists some free IE shells with tabs though) and I already have one insanely good popup browser (Ad Muncher). Still, I really like both Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird.
Do even open source people have to refer to us a consumers?? Anyone who uses the term directed torwards me in person is going to get a fist to the jaw
As for browsers, I use Firebird most of the time. However, I find myself having to fire up IE about once a week (sometimes more).. most of the time for multimedia (esp video), which Firebird seems to have trouble with some formats unless it’s set up right. Yeah, I know there’s ways to get it working, but this kind of shit should just work, and IE does – probably its greatest strength. I get video in IE where I often get jibberish in Firebird. Of course, I know this is a MIME-type problem, but I’d seriously rather look at video rather than jibberish.
As for IE browser frontends, I’ve tried several (Crazy Browser, Avante, etc) and my favorite so far is MyIE2. I use it at work because the intranet requires IE.
For an ad killer, I use The Proxomitron – best I’ve ever seen. It’s like having any web page you view run through a specialized HTML regular expression engine that you can tweak til your heart’s content
> Do even open source people have to refer to us a consumers??
Yeah, ‘freeloaders’ would be a better word
I don’t get it? Why use a webbrowser like IE where you’re unsafe no matter where you go. It caches things you’d really not want it to cash, and it’s just not safe at all!
One of the things I find really funny is users who use IE and also uses a firewall for instance. Geeez how stupid can a person get.
Be fast, be smart, be safe… use Firebird…
But Mozilla Firebird isn’t as good on Linux and MacOS as it is on Windows. The Linux-builds is built using GTK+ version 1 and got much slower response than under Windows.
Ehrm, in case you haven’t noticed. Most stuff is considerably faster in Windows. Just that some zeals find it so uncool to use Windows.
off-topic or what
Things being faster in Linux vs. in Windows really depends on your hardware, and the version of Windows. I myself find that most of my Linux applications perform faster than in Windows, and as always, I tell everyone YMMV.
http://www.avantbrowser.com
First let me say I used around 7 browsers heavily and I know/use/used Opera since 3.5 version(and fall in love with 3.51 already). Last year I used mostly Firebird on and off combined with pure IE but few months back I gave _another_ try to IE frontends.
avant browser -> way to go, it is freeware
myie2 -> is spyware/addware and is more bloated
netcaptor -> very good but $$$, and no single feature I need that avant doesn’t have
other’s frontends -> don’t matter much(unless you are 13 and you(definitely) need that l33+ +0ok some others provide)
Mozilla Firebird is very good project, today it might be 3rd best browser out there closing to beeing 2nd in the near future. What avant has firebird doesn’t? There are some things.
First let me say avant looks really matured compared to Firebird.
Then it renders 100%(not 99% nor 95% nor even 99.9% or such but 100% you know the different?) of pages you can find. It reloads all the windows if it fails/crashes on startup(like opera and not like sad buggy tab-extension mozilla plugin) out of the box. It has flash animation stopper(not usefull for my 100mbit but must have for dial-up), pop-up blocker more usefull than any mozilla(when the page isn’t loaded and you click on some popup, all popups are blocked). It actually OPENS windows I want him to open on popup and STOPS the one I don’t. It never freezes when doing “fast browsing TM”(loading numerous pages, working very fast/cruel with browser, loading 40 history pages in a 2 seconds(with 3rd mouse button) etc.), it ALLWAYS loads all tabs no matter whether you hit your ISP limit on connections or whatever(like firebird wont load the rest beyond 25 for example(0.6.1)), it supports activeX(yeah baby, I am not 13 I know how to secure windows) there are some really cute activeX components _I_ need e.g. mirriam-webster dicitionary(and not mozilla simplistic version), it only has 800KB executable and uncomparable install/download size(ie frontend), it REMEMBERS urls when I switch tab but didn’t started loading the page(usefull in countless situations), it feels matured wihtout any major glitch/bug(there are at least 10 major anoying bugs in 0.6.1 firebird which I won’t report because they already have what? 200000 bugs reported? and because they are so lame/basic bugs it anoys me to report to them any kid would spot them not qa), it can maximize all windows(e.g. putting your taskbar popus back to browser tabs), it can hover link urls not underline all of them, it has good fonts selection(not like mozilla even on windows! when firebird renders the page100% correctly fonts are different(proportional differencies matter much)) and few others I don’t remember atm.
Yes it can browse MSDN/technet baby 🙂
What Mozilla Firebird has Avant browser doesn’t have? Good skins, a bit better feeling it might be a safer. And better history/favorities feature.
P.S. On IE security, I use IE6 on patched WinXP SP1 under tweaked limited account. IE exploits aren’t really concerns to me even when I would download and “install” some nasty virus/backdoor(of a zero probability because KasperskyAV wouldn’t let me to even load it into memory and KAV runs with system credentials(so no virus could even shut it down)).
Avant is just a front-end for Internet Explorer. It suffers from all of the same bugs and problems IE does.
no bugs(nor problems) here pal
I don’t know why a browser should be named ‘firebird’, ‘mozilla’?! It feels like, it’s for kids. Have you ever wondered why people never took ‘turbo pascal’, ‘turbo C++’,
seriously? It’s because of the name! That’s they changed it to ‘Borland Pascal/ C++’, but both died though …
Funny..
Last week I wanted to order something with IE using Windows.
It didn’t work.
Ironically, the only way to order what I wanted was by using Firebird, while the site mentioned it was “recommended to use IE”
But trusted software’s always had a history of silly names. Unix was a pun on Multics, GNU and the score of fun infinitely recursive names out there, among with just plain fun stuff. I think the idea of the computer being fun only contributes towards it being easy to use, and encourages others to have a go at it.
http://dsfh24.hypermart.net/TStar-Enhanced-MDK9.1.png
…rather then a drab looking W2k clone.
Now that’s cool!!
What are you using to do that?? I’d love to have a desktop like that!
That has to be one of the nicest desktop screenshots I’ve ever seen!
I was skeptical, as Moz on WIN32 was just alitle too slow, and most sites looked alittle funky.
Firebird and t-bird are good, fast and reliable clients now for Win32…so check them out
Then it renders 100%(not 99% nor 95% nor even 99.9% or such but 100% you know the different?) of pages you can find
http://genezys.net/Samples/ROAM.xhtml
-> IE tries to download the page instead of displaying it
http://www.moronicbajebus.com/
-> No dynamic menus in IE
You see, one can find pages IE can’t render and mozilla can, proving you wrong.
Most of the pages I visit look better in Gecko/opera than in IE because they make heavy use of CSS/PNG. All the pages I create follow the WC standards which means that they look better in standard-compliant pages but remain usable in older software (IE).
read “w3C” and “standards-compliant User Agents” of course
> http://genezys.net/Samples/ROAM.xhtml
IE opens it without problem, it first ask because it’s not associated MIME type, you just click open and woala. Mozilla has not associated .rar type(and many more common) so don’t try to nitpick here.
I personaly don’t remember page in those years that looked better in opera than in IE 6. There might be some but is really a rare and precious thing =)
I love the way that IE that page for example :
< html > < form > < input type crash > </ form > </ html >
That’s a lot more funny that in Mozilla
Previous example is perhaps better handled like so
<html> <form> <type input crash> </form> </html>
That’s just a funny example, but month after month
nothing change and the security holes are still in IE.
Currently, we have an ugly list of 20 UNPATCHED SECURITY HOLES
http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/
That combined with the lack of Web Standard’s support should
convice you to STOP USGING IE or every IE-based browser.
RAR type ? in your imagination, it is a 100% xhtml page served with a 100% standards compliant xhtml mime type (application/xhtml+xml)
Ansd my IE6 is absolutely unable to display it.
I personaly don’t remember page in those years that looked better in opera than in IE 6. There might be some but is really a rare and precious thing =)
Oh, BTW, here is a small list from my bookmarks, all of them created very recently :
– http://pascal.chevrel.free.fr/carnet/
– http://www.virtuelvis.com/
– http://www.bryanbell.com/
– http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/
– http://www.rycks.com/
– http://www.mintchaos.com/
– http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/