I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firebird, the new direction for Mozilla browsing. Here were my impressions:
- Looks nice
- Seems quick
- Renders well
- Page-up and page-down often refuse to work
- Application freezes for up to a minute, randomly
- Dialogs (such as HTTP Basic Auth) can refuse to close, forcing you to quit the app
I'm suffering from horrendous Mozilla beta-fatigue. I've been supporting the browser, using it regularly since the single-digit milestone releases (Well, M9 anyway). It had a blissful year or two of useability and stability, and then... another radical change of direction lands us in beta-country again. I can't take it any more. Sure, I use the Safari beta on my iMac, but Safari's beta-ness expresses itself in missing functionality (most of which I would never use anyway), and rendering quirks. Not annoying freezes and dialog boxes that won't close.
I understand that the move away from the application suite was necessary, but this time I'm not playing. Wake me up when it's 1.0, I'll be sticking with the old stable branch, or browsing on my Mac until then.
I'm addicted to FireBird. It's fast when starting up and also when receiving HTML content (or at least appears to, because of the way it renders the pages). I'm not sure why you get freezes, but it could be due to your machine, because it is not a bug that I've heard of.
Tabbed-browsing is a winner, as is extensibility and XUL!
That sounds so much like me defending the Mozilla M-series milestones to my cow-orkers. :)
I'm glad that Firebird is doing what it's doing, and I'm glad people are enjoying its pre-releases. I'm just personally worn out after five years of being a Mozilla guinea-pig.
I'm in a similar headspace -- using Moz 1.3.1 at work & home, but I gave the linux Firebird release a whizz. After initially impressing me with it's lean & mean feel it hung & crashed twice, so I removed it. I'll check back in closer to 1.0 I think.
<rant>
On a side note, I'm beginning to despise large corporation IT policy. Someone high up in the Global IS group for my employer has decided that we're becoming a Microsoft house. Phase 1 was to shift our 7 year old sendmail server (that had a 5-nines reliability record) with an exchange server, which has so far been unavailable for a total of 5 days in the last 6 months. They're still letting us pick our browser however -- Internet Explorer 6.0, or **Netscape 4.76**. I mean, really, what the f*ck? I've broken the corporate IT policy and installed Mozilla because I *need* tabbed browsing nowadays. But I shouldn't have to break policy to get stability, usability and standards compliance. sheesh.
wow, that feels much better.
</rant>