Oct 15

Firebird Rises Again

The Mozilla Foundation has cranked out new versions of three major apps today. The Mozilla Suite goes to 1.5, with enhancements to Composer, a new spellchecker, and stability enhancements.

The world’s greatest browser (if you ask me), FireBird, goes to version 0.7 and gets enhanced preferences, alternate stylesheets features, and the ability to load HTML in the sidebar.

My favorite e-mail client, Thunderbird, goes to version 0.3 with enhanced IMAP support, some great new POP options, and better attachment handling.

Don’t let the 0.7 and 0.3 version numbers on Firebird and Thunderbird fool you - these products branched from VERY mature Mozilla code and are exceptionally stable. I’ve been using them for months and I have far fewer crashes with Thunderbird and Firebird than I ever did with Outlook and IE (but that’s not saying much).

by Joe   October 15, 2003 10:17 AM   |

Comments

by Deane,   October 15, 2003 10:46 AM  

Firebird is fantastic, but I don't think Thunderbird is quite mature enough yet. I get random errors with it, sometimes it just doesn't do things (I mark a nunch of messages as junk, and it moves some of them to the Junk folder, but not others) and this "Adaptive Junk Filtering" (a Bayesian-type spam filter) is still a ways off -- it just doesn't learn very quickly.

I'll install 0.3, but 0.2 hasn't quite done it for me. Firebird, however, I can recommend without reservation -- great, great browser.

Deane

by Joe,   October 15, 2003 11:29 AM  

It used to be that as a web developer, I coded all my pages to work in IE, then had to tweak it to be able to 'get by' in everything else (mostly Netscape 4.x)

These days I code everything to work in Mozilla/Firebird/Camino/etc (the Gecko browsers), and then I have to tweak it to work in IE. Mozilla has shed light on a lot of things that didn't work right in IE. With a total lack of innovation, Microsoft is being left in the dust in terms of browser innovation.

by Joe,   October 15, 2003 11:34 AM  

It used to be that as a web developer, I coded all my pages to work in IE, then had to tweak it to be able to 'get by' in everything else (mostly Netscape 4.x)

These days I code everything to work in Mozilla/Firebird/Camino/etc (the Gecko browsers), and then I have to tweak it to work in IE. Mozilla has shed light on a lot of things that didn't work right in IE. With a total lack of innovation, Microsoft is being left in the dust in terms of browser innovation.

by Sean,   October 15, 2003 12:06 PM  

I switched to Firebird a month or so ago, and haven't looked back. I even set it as me default browser, and love the tab browsing feature.

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