Mozilla Firebird 0.6 or Mozilla 1.4 Beta

Please don't make me any more confused than I already am Old age is no joke!

What's the difference between the two, and which is recommended? No email functionality needed, just browser.

 

Hi Dr. JB,

Old age is nature's joke on us all!

The differences in the two applications:

Mozilla is the open source code development, that goes hand in hand with Netscape Development. Mainly the Gecko engine which runs both Mozilla and Netscape.

The mozilla.org plan is to deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path. ( Netscape 7.02 being based on Mozilla 1.02.) The next Release of Netscape, will most likely be 7.1, which will be based on Mozilla 1.4 Final Release.

The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items, making riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. Mozilla Firebird is simply smaller, faster, and better, because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism.

What it boils down to, is that Netscape 7.1, and Mozilla 1.4, will probably be the last integrated application suites. Thus the development of Mozilla Firebird/Thunderbird. The Browser, Mail, and Composer, will be separate components; however, it is intended that the Mail (Thunderbird) component will be capable of either running as a standalone application or being installed directly into Firebird, a.k.a. the Mozilla Browser, as an extension.

My personal choice for stability is Mozilla 1.4b, and I have been using it since its release (5/16/03). I only have one Mail Account, but have experienced no problems to date.

I used Mozilla Firebird for a short time, but, on my system at least, it created a considerable loss of system resources, which resulted in having to shut down the system. It's definitely a good program, but much too early in development for stability (IMHO)...

If this isn't clear, let me know, as I have taken bits and pieces from several sites, to combine a more understandable answer to your question.
Mozilla Branding
Mozilla Development Roadmap
Mozilla Layout Engine

Then read this recent Netscape Newsgroup post by Jay Garcia, on Mozilla:
Is Mozilla For Users?

Ramona

 

re: mozilla and netscape

Ramona. Is jay Garcia a netscape evangelist?

 

Hi bluesky,

I'm sure he is heavily involved, but whether or not he is a member of the Tech Evangelism Team, I know not...

I have asked, and will let you know when I hear anything.

Ramona

 

re: firebird

I tried firebird and so far it is pretty stable. As far as firebird may be a resources hog, I am not quite sure. I ran both mozilla and firebird in windoes 2000 and mozilla consumed 22,000k, firebird 15,000k of memory.

One improvementover mozilla that I already found in firebird is that I could delete a bookmark link on the spot( similar to IE ) w/o having to click manage bookmark.

One thing should be changed is the icon. It uses the same mozilla icon, which is not a good idea.

I will post more on firebird when I have time to use more.

 

Firebird Icons; have fun.

http://iconpacks.mozdev.org/phoenix/

 

re: firebird's icon

Yeah. I found it and have changed firebird shortcut. But the icon of firebird.exe can't be changed, so we still see the mozilla head at the top left of the browser. Not that I don't like mozilla . I just want them to be different.

 

That icon is stored in the MozillaFirebird\chrome\icons\default folder and is called main-Window.ico.

You can replace it with another icon, just make sure that you name it to main-Window.ico.

Sailfish also has an Icon Pack that will replace all of the default icons for Mozilla browsers with the Skypilot classic icons.

This is a self installing icon pack, so all you do is click on the link and it will install the icons.

http://www.projectit.com/skypilot/icons/skypiloticons11.xpi

http://www.projectit.com/skypilot/

 

Yup! Sailfish's Sky Pilot is what I've been using also. It's the coolest one I've seen.

 

re: firebird or mozilla

Well. It probably comes down to this. If you have a mail client already, then firebird will be a good choice. But then again, you can run mozilla w/o the mail server.

Both of them are good. Tough choice.

 

Bluesky wrote: "I tried firebird and so far it is pretty stable. As far as firebird may be a resources hog, I am not quite sure. I ran both mozilla and firebird in windoes 2000 and mozilla consumed 22,000k, firebird 15,000k of memory."

My question is, how do you find this information about a program's resource use?

Cybernut

 

re: firebird

For windows 2000:

ctrl + shift + esc --> processes

BTW, my mozilla has also mailserver, composer.

 

I am using the 6-01 unofficial build with Aggressive Optimizations for the P3 & P4 processor. It is very stable and seems to run faster.

It is still using a fair amount of resources, about 22mb with 5 tabs open. It actually uses less resources this way than 4 windows of IE or Netscape 4.x or for that matter using tabs in Mozilla, Firebird and Netscape 7.0x is less memory hungry than using full windows of each.

Something to keep in mind if you have lower resources is tabbed browsing.


As far as stability, right now the browser is at a very stable stage, even using unofficial development builds, although some of the development builds were very unstable.

Either use a milestone, such as Mozilla FIrebird 0.6, or check on the MozillaZine Forums to see what other people are reporting about the builds.

All in all, since this is still development quality software, it is very impressive and stable.

I also use the Thunderbird Mail client, since I like to have my email seperate from my browser, this way if either of them crash, then it does not take out the other one, now this does take up more memory since at this time they are not sharing any code, but this system has plenty of memory to spare.


One thing with the birds, is that if you minimize it, it will release memory back to the system. Try it with 2000 or XP task manager and you will see what I mean.