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Aiglos · Nov 9, 2003, 09:20 PM

A bit of an old news i guess but...

Mozilla for the mac has a new default theme that looks a ton better than the previous defualt theme. Download the latest nightly build. It uses an elegant theme called "Pinstripe3". Beautiful icons IMO. You can get it here

I have no idea if the latest build is any more stable, but it looks nice!

oVeRmInD911 · Nov 9, 2003, 10:54 PM

Isn't Mozilla Firebird pretty much a port of Camino to Windows and Linux? Only using XUL?

What's the point of a Mac OS X version?

It's pretty much Safari, only with a Mozilla backend.

gorickey · Nov 9, 2003, 11:01 PM

Screenshot?

wataru · Nov 9, 2003, 11:24 PM

Originally posted by oVeRmInD911:
Isn't Mozilla Firebird pretty much a port of Camino to Windows and Linux? Only using XUL?

What's the point of a Mac OS X version?

It's pretty much Safari, only with a Mozilla backend.

The point of it is that it will soon be the only Mozilla-derived browser under development.

Mike S. · Nov 9, 2003, 11:42 PM

Click here for a picture

Have they folded Camino's pseudo aqua form widgets into Firebird?

I'm going to submit it as an enhancement in bugzilla if it hasn't been done by the next release.

gorickey · Nov 9, 2003, 11:52 PM

Wow, that is much nicer looking....

Catfish_Man · Nov 10, 2003, 01:16 AM

Originally posted by wataru:
The point of it is that it will soon be the only Mozilla-derived browser under development.

No, that's incorrect. The roadmap states that Camino will continue development, just like Galeon and the other native gecko browsers.

Developer · Nov 10, 2003, 01:27 AM

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
No, that's incorrect. The roadmap states that Camino will continue development.

Paper doesn't blush.

wataru · Nov 10, 2003, 02:04 AM

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
No, that's incorrect. The roadmap states that Camino will continue development, just like Galeon and the other native gecko browsers.

While the roadmap may say that, I think the dwindling man hours being put into Camino speak for themselves. Firebird is the future, for better or worse.

ryaxnb · Nov 10, 2003, 03:37 AM

Originally posted by oVeRmInD911:
Isn't Mozilla Firebird pretty much a port of Camino to Windows and Linux? Only using XUL?

What's the point of a Mac OS X version?

It's pretty much Safari, only with a Mozilla backend.

"en-oh, en-oh, no. Firebird has different speeds, different prefs, extendibility unlike Camino, different interface in more then just aesthetics (i.e. bookmarks management is different,) and Thunderbird integration, as well as the browser back end of what I call "Mozilla 2" but no one's sure what it will really be called AFAIK. Firebird's extendibility is a big improvement compared to Camino. AFAIK Firebird is more Mozilla Navigator take out of it's shell and having modified (like 40,000 lines) code then Camino in XUL.

kovacs · Nov 10, 2003, 08:02 AM

Originally posted by Mike S.:
Click here for a picture

Have they folded Camino's pseudo aqua form widgets into Firebird?

I'm going to submit it as an enhancement in bugzilla if it hasn't been done by the next release.

Looks much better, but why do they insist on using two separate buttons for functions that are mutually exclusive, stop and reload ?

:haripu: · Nov 10, 2003, 08:35 AM

Originally posted by kovacs:
Looks much better, but why do they insist on using two separate buttons for functions that are mutually exclusive, stop and reload ?

I prefer it that way. The only thing I hate with Safari is when I press the stop button and see no reaction after a second or two I tend to press it again. But suddenly the stop button turns to the reload button and my second click was actually a "reload" click. Very annoying.

sushiism · Nov 10, 2003, 08:40 AM

i prefer seperate buttons too, safaris bugs the hell out of me when i first open a window, by the time ive reached stop its turned to reload and then ive got to wait all over agian ARGH and also if you stop it adn type something it usually keeps loading anyway and replaces what you typed with your home page address

sushiism · Nov 10, 2003, 08:47 AM

arghh prefs on first running came out in a huge sheet and filled my entire screen.
and the thing that bugs me about firebird is the lack of deeper polish e.g camino i drag a link off my bar and i get a nice semi tran version of what im dragging, firebird however you just get an ugly outline, although both of thme suffer from text/image dragging being ugly, also annoying they didnt include a graphite version of it

-just noticed
JESUS CHRIST the drop down boxes/command buttons are ugly ... mmmm windows style, think i will stick with camino

Arkham_c · Nov 10, 2003, 10:33 AM

Originally posted by sushiism:
i prefer seperate buttons too, safaris bugs the hell out of me when i first open a window, by the time ive reached stop its turned to reload and then ive got to wait all over agian ARGH and also if you stop it adn type something it usually keeps loading anyway and replaces what you typed with your home page address

Hit command-period to stop loading without possibly auto-reloading.

Sarc · Nov 10, 2003, 12:54 PM

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
No, that's incorrect. The roadmap states that Camino will continue development, just like Galeon and the other native gecko browsers.

yeah ... and Motorola's roadmap stated we should have a 64bit G5 processor by late 2001

Catfish_Man · Nov 10, 2003, 02:39 PM

Originally posted by Sarc:
yeah ... and Motorola's roadmap stated we should have a 64bit G5 processor by late 2001

Of course, since Camino is open source, you can go and see all the work they've been doing on it in the past 3 weeks or so (10,000 line bookmarks patch, for example).

bmedina · Nov 10, 2003, 03:11 PM

Firebird is quickly becoming my favorite browser on OS X. And it's nice to be able to go to a Windows box and use the exact same thing.

Where are you guys reading that Camino development has stopped? It'a actually picked up quite a bit in the past month.

wataru · Nov 10, 2003, 03:51 PM

Originally posted by bmedina:
Where are you guys reading that Camino development has stopped? It'a actually picked up quite a bit in the past month.

No one said it stopped. What people said is essentially that it does not have the guaranteed continued existence that Firebird does, and thus "Firebird is the future."

DVD Plaza · Nov 10, 2003, 07:15 PM

Originally posted by kovacs:
Looks much better, but why do they insist on using two separate buttons for functions that are mutually exclusive, stop and reload ?

I can't stand shared stop/reload buttons, causes me all end of hell. It's like having training wheels on a bike, good for beginners but a pain in the neck for anyone else.

Originally posted by wataru:
No one said it stopped. What people said is essentially that it does not have the guaranteed continued existence that Firebird does, and thus "Firebird is the future."

Where did this come from? When Firebird first began development they specifically said they had no intention of supporting OSX because Firebird was the "other OS" equivalent of what Camino was doing on OSX. They said Firebird "might" compile on OSX, but that wasn't their focus. When/where did this change? I know they have an OSX download but I've never heard them suddenly say the 100% native OSX Camino is being ditched and Firebird will be used instead?

Aiglos · Nov 10, 2003, 08:14 PM

Hmmm... My impression was that Camino was supposed to be the Gecko rendering engine with a Cocoa front end. I don't believe support has officially halted for Camino, but it is really slowing in pace compared to Firebird. Isn't there just one guy coding for Camino?

I haven't really followed the soap opera surrounding Mozilla in general, I just like using their browser. Anyways, recently I've downloaded Camino (their nightly build) and I found it terribly slow on my mac (scrolling wise). I've got a G4 Sawtooth @ 450 w/ 708 MB RAM (w/ Pnather). Firebird flies copared to Camino. Too bad, back in the day, I used to be a real Camino kinda guy. How does Camino perform on your macs using your specs?

fortepianissimo · Nov 10, 2003, 08:18 PM

tried it - still slow comparing to Safari, and to some previous versions of Camino...

ryaxnb · Nov 10, 2003, 08:43 PM

Originally posted by fortepianissimo:
tried it - still slow comparing to Safari, and to some previous versions of Camino...

Huh. That's weird. This page (scroll down to 'the tests begin') shows Firebird neatly beating Safari, but not Camino.
ESPN: 3.70 in Firebird, 3.51 in Camino(!,) and 4.21 in Safari.
PGA: 5.03 in Firebird, 4.23 in Camino(!,) and 5.61 in Safari.
PNG demo 1.33 in Firebird(!,) 1.38 in Camino, and 1.92 in Safari.
So much for 'fastest browser'

As you can see, Camino is generally the browser to beat. Of course, this only tests a [very] small portion of the web. Also, Safari's big design objective was speed (then why is it slow comapared to Camino?...,) whereas Firebird's objective was slimming down Mozilla, namely creating a browser that's expandable, sleek, and able to best IE, all will using XUL.

fortepianissimo · Nov 10, 2003, 09:03 PM

Originally posted by ryaxnb:
Huh. That's weird. This page (scroll down to 'the tests begin') shows Firebird neatly beating Safari, but not Camino.
ESPN: 3.70 in Firebird, 3.51 in Camino(!,) and 4.21 in Safari.
PGA: 5.03 in Firebird, 4.23 in Camino(!,) and 5.61 in Safari.
PNG demo 1.33 in Firebird(!,) 1.38 in Camino, and 1.92 in Safari.
So much for 'fastest browser' As you can see, Camino is generally the browser to beat. Of course, this only tests a [very] small portion of the web. Also, Safari's big design objective was speed (then why is it slow comapared to Camino?...,) whereas Firebird's objective was slimming down Mozilla, namely creating a browser that's expandable, sleek, and able to best IE, all will using XUL.

Thx for the link...

I guess I was referring to the perceptive speed - for example, scrolling in Safari is much faster than in Camino/Firebird. True that when comparing only rendering Camino/Firebird might be faster, but for me, slower in UI is actually worse than being a bit slower in rendering.

Also, most of the browsers have seen updates since that test. For me, right now Safari (1.1) beats the latest nightly of Firebird and Camino. Don't get me wrong - I do hope Camino can get better and better: I really miss the keyword bookmarks and type-ahead search. But until the random freeze in Camino gets fixed (this happens from time to time and you just have to wait for the darned beachball), I guess I'll have to settle down with Safari for now...

wataru · Nov 10, 2003, 10:12 PM

Originally posted by DVD Plaza:
Where did this come from? When Firebird first began development they specifically said they had no intention of supporting OSX because Firebird was the "other OS" equivalent of what Camino was doing on OSX. They said Firebird "might" compile on OSX, but that wasn't their focus. When/where did this change? I know they have an OSX download but I've never heard them suddenly say the 100% native OSX Camino is being ditched and Firebird will be used instead?

The Mozilla roadmap: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html

1. Switch Mozilla's default browser component from the XPFE-based Navigator to the standalone Mozilla Firebird browser. Note: the standalone browser's user interface is defined entirely using XUL. So in preferring it, we are not deprecating XUL. We are demonstrating how XUL is a sound basis for fast, cross-platform applications such as Mozilla Firebird.

...

3. Deliver a Mozilla 1.4 milestone that can replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development path, then move on to make riskier changes during 1.5 and 1.6. The major changes after 1.4 involve switching to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird, and working aggressively on the next two items.

Later on:
Therefore, in switching browsers, we are not dropping XUL on the Mac. We aim to ensure that Mozilla's cross-platform applications and toolkit remain both cross-platform and viable as applications that people actually use. And we need the same kind of embedded Gecko test coverage on the Mac that we get on other platforms. So, when we switch the default-built browser to Mozilla Firebird, we will provide daily and milestone builds of it for OS X

snerdini · Nov 10, 2003, 10:38 PM

Well, I installed it, went to Prefs, and it opened a sheet larger than my frickin' screen! I couldn't resize it, and for some reason, the OK button didn't respond to the enter key. Wonderful, just wonderful...

snerdini · Nov 10, 2003, 10:43 PM

Sorry about that last post...had a hard day today. Firebird is looking good, a lot better than previous builds - but I have to ask...why can't they get rid of those ass-ugly form widgets? Isn't there any way they can use the Mac OS X native widgets?

CheesePuff · Nov 10, 2003, 10:51 PM

Originally posted by snerdini:
Well, I installed it, went to Prefs, and it opened a sheet larger than my frickin' screen! I couldn't resize it, and for some reason, the OK button didn't respond to the enter key. Wonderful, just wonderful...

Same thing happened to me.

Cadaver · Nov 10, 2003, 11:30 PM

Originally posted by fortepianissimo:
Thx for the link...

I guess I was referring to the perceptive speed - for example, scrolling in Safari is much faster than in Camino/Firebird. True that when comparing only rendering Camino/Firebird might be faster, but for me, slower in UI is actually worse than being a bit slower in rendering.

In the URL bar for either Mozilla or Firebird, type about:config and you'll get an editable list of parsed xml configuration settings. There are settings that deal with the mouse wheel scrolling speed (use system speed [true/false] number of lines, smooth scrolling, etc.). Just be careful what you edit.

Jowy · Nov 11, 2003, 12:17 AM

Originally posted by snerdini:
Well, I installed it, went to Prefs, and it opened a sheet larger than my frickin' screen! I couldn't resize it, and for some reason, the OK button didn't respond to the enter key. Wonderful, just wonderful...

Same here as well. I tried deleting the prefs which didn't work. I also noticed the prefs not responding to the keyboard. Very odd. Until I can set the prefs for the nightlies, I'm sticking with the current Firebird release.

solbo · Nov 11, 2003, 12:42 AM

Originally posted by Jowy:
Same here as well. I tried deleting the prefs which didn't work. I also noticed the prefs not responding to the keyboard. Very odd. Until I can set the prefs for the nightlies, I'm sticking with the current Firebird release.

If you open the preferences and then quit Firebird and then reopen it they should open to a normal size. Don't know why.

Jowy · Nov 11, 2003, 11:24 AM

Originally posted by solbo:
If you open the preferences and then quit Firebird and then reopen it they should open to a normal size. Don't know why.

Ah thank you! For whatever reason I had not tried that. Works great now. Thanks again

NeXTLoop · Nov 11, 2003, 01:20 PM

After seeing this thread, I went and downloaded Firebird, first 0.7.1 then the latest nightly. Extremely impressed. Making Pinstripe the default theme in the latest nightlies was an excellant move. The speed is definitely faster than Safari. And after executing a search on these forums, I can go Back to the search results without being asked to resend data.

This could very well become my default browser. Awesome work from the Mozilla team.

Catfish_Man · Nov 11, 2003, 02:13 PM

Originally posted by Aiglos:
Hmmm... My impression was that Camino was supposed to be the Gecko rendering engine with a Cocoa front end. I don't believe support has officially halted for Camino, but it is really slowing in pace compared to Firebird. Isn't there just one guy coding for Camino?

I haven't really followed the soap opera surrounding Mozilla in general, I just like using their browser. Anyways, recently I've downloaded Camino (their nightly build) and I found it terribly slow on my mac (scrolling wise). I've got a G4 Sawtooth @ 450 w/ 708 MB RAM (w/ Pnather). Firebird flies copared to Camino. Too bad, back in the day, I used to be a real Camino kinda guy. How does Camino perform on your macs using your specs?

There are at least two or three more people working on Camino now, the pace has picked up quite a bit. On my machine Firebird and Camino are both faster than Safari (v100) by a bit, but I'm not sure which of the gecko browsers is fastest. Firebird scrolls faster but choppier, Camino launches faster, Firebird might render pages a little faster.

ryaxnb · Nov 11, 2003, 04:14 PM

Originally posted by snerdini:
Well, I installed it, went to Prefs, and it opened a sheet larger than my frickin' screen! I couldn't resize it, and for some reason, the OK button didn't respond to the enter key. Wonderful, just wonderful...

Well, it's alpha (or prealpha-)style build from a beta program.

snerdini · Nov 11, 2003, 05:20 PM

Originally posted by ryaxnb:
Well, it's alpha (or prealpha-)style build from a beta program.

I wasn't inferring that Firebird is a shoddy product - it was just annoying. I'm fully aware that a beta product will have its bugs...

Aiglos · Nov 12, 2003, 10:30 AM

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
There are at least two or three more people working on Camino now, the pace has picked up quite a bit. On my machine Firebird and Camino are both faster than Safari (v100) by a bit, but I'm not sure which of the gecko browsers is fastest. Firebird scrolls faster but choppier, Camino launches faster, Firebird might render pages a little faster.

That's a relief.

I do notice that Camino launches faster, in terms of render/display of webpages i find it hard to find a winner, I would say Firebird, but maybe by half a millisecond.

King Bob On The Cob · Nov 12, 2003, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by Aiglos:
That's a relief.

I do notice that Camino launches faster, in terms of render/display of webpages i find it hard to find a winner, I would say Firebird, but maybe by half a millisecond.

Does anyone remember the choices we had in 10.0?
IE - crashed like a b�tch
iCab - slow, bad carbon port
OmniWeb - Slow, bad DOM model, but beautiful

Now if you were there these petty millisecond differences still make them feel like heaven.

Cadaver · Nov 12, 2003, 09:36 PM

Originally posted by King Bob On The Cob:
Does anyone remember the choices we had in 10.0?
IE - crashed like a b�tch
iCab - slow, bad carbon port
OmniWeb - Slow, bad DOM model, but beautiful

Now if you were there these petty millisecond differences still make them feel like heaven.

Amen, brother

With MacOS X 10.0.x, I used to run the Classic version of Internet Explorer. It was the only browser at the time that actually worked!

snerdini · Nov 12, 2003, 09:45 PM

Originally posted by Cadaver:
Amen, brother

With MacOS X 10.0.x, I used to run the Classic version of Internet Explorer. It was the only browser at the time that actually worked!

Sadly, I did the same thing for a while...

**shudders**

CharlesS · Nov 12, 2003, 10:45 PM

The Camino developers should figure out a way to make Gecko use native NSTextViews, complete with spell-check, for forms, like OmniWeb and Safari do.

See if people would still want to use Firebird on the Mac then...