I installed Mozilla Firebird today. As I am encouraging my father to migrate away from the stale IE (since Microsoft obtained near-monopoly status, that browser hasn’t been updated to include such vital features like tabbed browsing), and I have already switched to Safari on my Mac, I also decided to have a new look at Firebird (I had tried an early version of Phoenix, 0.3 I believe). Firebird (formerly Phoenix, soon to be renamed Mozilla Browser) is based on Mozilla, but is less resource-intensive because it does not try to be all things to all people and is just a browser (and not a HTML editor, email program, newsreader, IRC client, dessert topping and floor wax). Firebird will be the official Mozilla browser, replacing the current Mozilla suite in the medium term.

The core rendering engine is the same, and it uses the same XUL cross-platform UI toolkit, so migrating from Mozilla is relatively painless. Bookmarks are compatible. You can even copy over saved passwords, albeit at the cost of removing strong cryptographic password protection on them. To do so, reset the Master password to empty, uncheck the “Use encryption when storing sensitive data”, and copy a file called XYZ.s from your Mozilla profile to your Firebird profile, where XYZ is a random series of digits, for more information see this article.

First impressions:

  • It certainly loads faster.

  • It honors the Windows default mail and newsreader settings, so when a mailto: URL is encountered, it starts Outlook for me as I would like it to, not the half-baked Mozilla mail client. Big plus!

  • The toolbars are customizable

  • It does not yet have the DOM inspector and Venkman JavaScript debugger, both very useful for web development, but they will eventually be available as extensions

  • No annoying download manager to clean up, instead, a simple download box like IE and Netscape 4

  • With a few simple changes to the config files, ads and popups are blocked without having to install a blocker such as WebWasher.

  • The “Add bookmarks” command opens a dialog with the complete bookmarks folders hierarchy flattened into a single list (as opposed to a Tree control in Seamonkey). When you have a bookmarks hierarchy as large and complex as mine, this is unusable. I could use the bookmarks sidebar instead, but a more efficient way is to drag-and-drop into the menu, in a way reminiscent of how the Windows Start menu can be rearranged. Neither method is as efficient as Netscape 4’s “File as” functionality, but this comes close.

  • The tabs don’t quite look as nice as Seamonkey’s. You do not have the ability to add a group of tabs as a single bookmark, but you can add them as a bookmarks folder, and all bookmarks folders havean “Open in tabs” option. Gain some, lose some.

  • Bookmark keyword searching is amazing. For example, I can search IMDB for Hank Azaria by just typing “imdb hank azaria in the URL bar. Admittedly, Seamoney had that capability as well.

  • Bookmark separators can have names, which makes for cleaner organization of bookmarks when subfolders are overkill.

I will try it a little bit longer, but I think I might well migrate to Firebird as my primary browser.