Mozilla

Firefox

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Mozilla Firebird 0.8 is released, and oh, it's got a new name, again. The new name is Mozilla Firefox. The name change FAQ has the details, Ben Goodger and Steven Garrity and Jon Hicks have more details about the rebranding. So the name went from mozilla/browser, to m/b, to Phoenix, to Firebird, and now again to Firefox. Starts looking like a soap opera, I think...

What's worse, is that the Windows build is only available as a Windows installer. And that''s bad because a) my employer doesn't allow downloads of EXE files, and b) we don't have the authorisations to install software on our WindowsNT machines. Extracting a zipfile somewhere in a hidden directory, muffled away in the Windows directories wasn't a problem, but now I'm afraid I'm stuck with Firebird 0.7...

Update : there's a zipfile available on texturizer.net. Wheeee !!!

Switching to the Birds

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More than two years ago, in September 2001, I choose for Mozilla 0.9.3 as my default browser. It was a significant change from the commercial Netscape Communicator Suite with its horrible Motif look and feel, and its crash prone behaviour. I never regretted that decision. It was an exciting time, seeing Mozilla develop from a simple browser to the modern, secure and feature rich program it is today.

This weekend, I made a similar move by selecting Mozilla Firebird and ThunderBird as my default browser and email programs. It took a while, but I'm quickly getting comfortable using these spiffy looking programs. I discovered the Thunderbird tips 'n tricks site, and can recommend the different Quote Level Colors modification : it adds different colors of both the text and background of different quote levels in messages. This makes it much easier to follow a long discussion in newsgroups for example, where the level of reply quotes can go very deep.

Stop animated icons in FireBird

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I still wonder why Mozilla FireBird has no option to turn off animated gifs. I mean, it's not like they are Netscape or AOL, or what :) But because FireBird still has no GUI for this, it doesn't mean there's no support for stopping animated gifs.

To change this in firebird:
- type about:config in the location bar
- scroll down to image.animation_mode
- set to "none" for no animation, or "once" for a single loop
- restart your browser

Mozilla's week of glory

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It has been a busy week for Mozilla's FTP servers, with new releases of Mozilla, FireBird and ThunderBird. The FireBird site even got a spiffy new look, but got retracted again because it apparantly reminded too many people of a Mexican airline site. If you're still not using Mozilla or FireBird, you really should give it a chance : it's a browser which hasn't more than 20 unpatched critical security holes and has popup and Flash blockers, and more than 100 extensions, which are the car spoilers of your browser.

The unpatched thing reminds me of my Win2K box : I once did a test between Linux and Win2K to see which one booted faster. Win2K beat my Linux box with 8 seconds, but then again my Win2K machine doesn't start up a web-, SSH-, SQL- and two X-servers, so the test was somewhat biased towards Win2K. In the craze of the Swen/Gibe madness, I patched the Winbox : it took me 6 reboots to bring the damned thing into a safe(r) state, and now it takes two to three times longer to boot.

How about a nice cup of... Mozilla coffee

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RJ Tarpley's Coffee Company has dedicated a special selection of gourmet coffees to help benefit The Mozilla Foundation. Owner, Ron Tarpley is a self described 'Mozilla Geek' and heavy coffee drinker so the marriage between the two seemed natural. Mozilla users simply go to www.rjtarpleys.com/mozillacoffee.html\ and select a coffee. All of the 'Lizard Coffees' are 100% Arabica beans and are carefully micro-roasted in small batches. RJ Tarpley's will split half the profit on all orders directly to The Mozilla Foundation. Tarpley points out that if someone would like to choose another selection from his site that is not on the Mozilla page to simply put a note in the comments to support Mozilla and The Foundation will get the credit. 'I think this will be a great fundraiser for the foundation because I know that the folks who spend a lot of time on the computer drink a lot of coffee.'

Someone care to make a Java pun ;) ?