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
my point was that 0.8 has been available for other OSes before this public release as well, in the same way as it has for BeOS.
“If you call it Firefox(the experimental “soviet” mig) in the movie of the same name..”
Best selling thriller by Craig Thomas. The movie came some time later.
“then I guess you call the mail/news client, ‘Airwolf'”
If we are sticking to Craig Thomas books, it would be “Wolfsbane.” Hmm, I suppose the Windows version of the browser would then be “Firefox Down?” [The sequel to the original book]
Re: Next name–Foxhound, after the real, as opposed to litarary, version of the MiG-31.
<g>
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Regards,
Michael P. Reed
Have you reported these bugs? How else will these issues get fixed?
I meant to respond to Mario’s comment in my previous one. Eugenia, a “preview” function for comments would be a great addition to this website.
yes, autistic liscense I know. Point maybe is: both names are ficticious air frame code names.. made into a movie, and a tv show.
I hear some who like the movie, others hate it, some hate the book. I read the book, seen the movie.
The firefox project people thought “airwolf” was “classic”.
seriously, who still uses BeOS?
a lot of people.
The new version seems to be cool. The new installer is good. But I think the archive versions should also be available. Tha t makes my life easier on workstations at my university.
The new logo is awesome. I didn’t feel any difference from firebird in terms of page rendering.
I would certainly like Mozilla crew to stop the name game
Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox …guess what’s next FireWire ??…oops..
Stop the name mess guys and continue to develop this beautiful piece of software
Come on people what is the big deal about a name change? If a user can’t remember that “firefox” is their browser or even just “click on the icon that looks like this” then I am not sure they are really the target audience just yet. It is not that challenging. From a marketing/branding standpoint you do not want to change the name too often, but that does not matter one whit when it comes to funtionality.
They could call it “ni!” or “Bartleby the Scrivener” for all I care. As long as the browser does it’s job and does it well. And from what I have seen so far firefox does do it’s job well.
Its so much faster now
You don’t think this but outside of the techies, no one exactly can figure out what a “Mozilla” is.
a Ghetto Godzilla?
But, people know firefox, and airwolf.
names can be important, in that sense.
if mozilla cranks out another version faster than this, web pages are gonna start catching on fire! this is the fastest rendering ive ever seen.
In regards to KDE’s supposedly intelligent naming scheme. My toddlers favorite KDE program comes to mind. ktuberling which of course is the name KDE gives to its “Potato Guy” application. It was quite a challenge the first time I tried to figure the name out over an ssh connection I wanted to export the display from. potatoguy? potato? guy? kpotato? kpotatoguy? kpotato guy?
I’ve downloaded NVU, it’s nice! But still missing is a complete Web view, instead of opening just one HTML file at a time, we should have the choice to open a Website, like Frontpage does.
I realy like to see ALL of my Website and be able to look at all the link/broken link and all the other info that FP can give.
All in all, for a 0.1 release, it’s good!
Strange. In my company I installed 0.8 and it worked fine.
At home I works so bad! No scrollbars, options don’t show what I did set up, so navigation buttons…
Only difference is at home I have no SP1. Will now try to remove anything from 0.7….
Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail thank you.
Of course I thought of it. But then, there is a bug that is the most irritating usability-wise (for me) which I submitted about a year ago.
Since then, every week I receive an automated report from bugzilla saying “bug XXXX is a duplicate of bug YYYY”, meaning that people are constantly finding the bug, and yet none of the developers gives a duck about it.
I am not bullshitting you:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182345
assigned as a duplicate of:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20618
I love it. It’s super fast.
Mozilla SeaMonkeyBirdOnFire! Will never be confused with anyone! Maybe.
Having used Firefox for several hours now, I really love it. Now I don’t even need the fact that Opera is going public as an excuse to stop using their browser cause Firefox is now on par with it, just as fast but with a cleaner and more usable GUI. Best of all, it’s free.
Hi
There is a lot of bugs in mozilla but reporting it here would gain you nothing at all. if its a trouble with mozilla firefox you might comment on it. if its only there in seamonkey even commenting on it here is irrelevant
Egads! Mozilla browsers have almost as many names as Linux kernels! That’s not right!
From the Nvu faq:
“Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) …”
Hi
Mozilla is a very big project. If you compare the lines of code with the kernel, you will find that they are similar.
Like I said before writing a browser which only has to intercept valid html code is easy but if you have to intercept and parse badly written code and do it exactly like the competition while gaining market share thats hard to do.
Its not right having so many bugs in a complex product but things are improving. take a look at the latest version of firefox and you will agree
regards
rahul
really, let’s stop criticizing the project for its wacky names. let’s just focus on what it’s all about: it’s a lightweight, fast and efficient browser.
and i think that as long as they can accomplish that (and with every official preview release they seem to be doing so) then it’s fine by me
I just love the GTK2 + XFT version of Firefox – it looks great! Its picked up all my Gnome theme widgets.
Well… To sum up my experience with Firefox… All I need to say is SMOKIN! I can’t believe how much faster this thing is! Too bad I paid $15.00 to upgrade Opera!
maybe Eugenia should include the mirrors link at the Top of the page , for some people might not go all the way to post 120 or so ,and mozilla site still overwhelmed I suppose…
tried download few times today w/o success till I bumped into a mirror link.
Sure they’d appreciate it, and take some traffic off the mozilla site – curious about their hits today – .
They finally changed that stupid looking icon. Now my girlfriend will stop bitching about it.
Good job
The little details make all the difference with this little proggie.
The built in bookmarks point you to the themes and extension pages right away as well as import IE faves on the win32 version. Tabbed browsing makes surfing feel much faster since I don’t have to load new browser windows on this ol’ lappie. I don’t know how necessary the new download manager was but it seems to work well so far.
the folks going on about how zippy this feels…are exactly right! This is a great piece of software. I would like to test it on linux too, as soon as I get a chance. The XFT version sounds yummy
click on “form” button
click on “Fewer properties” button to toggle to “More properties”
drop down method
click on “More properties”
drop down Encoding
Half the dialog disappears.
That’s a bad, bad name. It just doesn’t flow and I feel stupid saying it out loud. Did they put even ten minutes of thought into it? Completely. Unmarketable. Name.
To be honest I could not care less about the name of the browser I am using.
The only thing one should care about with browser choice are:
– The ability to view any page, and so far it’s not the case.
(Ft.com; cnn.com; macbidouille.com don’t work)
– How fast it is to load pages.
Firefox is the One.
– Is it safe to use?
One can safely say than anything but expoler is safe.
– Is it innovative
Depends on what one called innovative but the google integration or tab browsing can be consider innovative.
the fast forward in Opera as well
Globally Firefox is a good choice but it still needs to evolve.
I just visited those sites which you said didn’t work and they worked fine. Both with firefox and konqueror 3.2. Maybe its something wrong with your configuration.
Firefox leaks like crazy… In Firebird (0.7), when opening tabs, you’d
expect slight increases in virtual memory, however, when closing
those tabs, you’d see the virtual memory scale down. In 0.8, the
virtual memory sticks around even after you close tabs… hmmm…
memory leak?!
Hi
It doesnt function that way in my system.
make sure you remove the previous profiles and extensions before u install this
“Firefox leaks like crazy… In Firebird (0.7), when opening tabs, you’d
expect slight increases in virtual memory, however, when closing
those tabs, you’d see the virtual memory scale down. In 0.8, the
virtual memory sticks around even after you close tabs… hmmm…
memory leak?!”
Why don’t you run memprof mozilla-firefox and tell us if it has memory leaks instead of supposing? This could be some kind of cacheing thing.
So is it quicker than khtml now? Cause if it is I might use it again, but I like Konqueror’s popup blocking so much.