Mozilla Firebird is now Firefox

SteveC

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In yet another name change, Firebird has been renamed to Firefox, and 0.8 has been released. Any guesses on when the next name change will be?
 

Mercutio

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Since "Firefox" is a series of fantasy novels and a really bad Clint Eastwood movie, you can bet it's coming.
 

CityK

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All this name changing business is annoying.

And, as per usual in coinciding with a Mozilla release, Mozillazine is unreachable....they really should do something about the severs they use.
 

sechs

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I think that they should call it "Mozilla Browser"

It's simple and hard to confuse with something else.
 

CityK

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CityK said:
And, as per usual in coinciding with a Mozilla release, Mozillazine is unreachable....they really should do something about the severs they use.

Well Mozillazine's front page is certainly working again. And with a nice new design now too! I also see that my earlier comment about their servers isn't lost on them either.
 

Platform

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SteveC said:
Any guesses on when the next name change will be?

Yes, I have two guesses:

  • 1.) For the next version, they'll once again confuse / annoy the hell out of everyone by bringing back -- yet again -- the name Firebird.


    2.) It'll stay the same for a while, until an eventual full merger with Netscrape. Then, it'll get renamed to Moby Dick.
 

SteveC

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ddrueding said:
I wish it hadn't taken over all those file associations, though :(

Which ones did it take over? I know some of the previous builds took over .gif and .jpg association, but it didn't do that for me this time.
 

Mercutio

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Some programs guard those file associations, like ACDSee. And on XP, it doesn't matter much anyway, since the default action is to preview with the fax viewer (just another reason to hate XP, IMO).
 

EdwardK

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I downloaded and installed FireFox last night and it is very fast indeed. Very fast loading times.
Have now trashed Firebird and using FireFox from now on :mrgrn:

Cheers,
Edward


P.S I hope it will not merge with Netscape and beomes bloatware!
 

GIANT

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EdwardK said:
P.S I hope it will not merge with Netscape and beomes bloatware!

There seems to be a coder that came over a while back from the older Mozilla project that has a talent for writing buggy code.

Before that merger, the old Phoenix browser was actually quite stable. Then, this "merger of talent" took place, some updates were performed, the new Firebird browser released, and wah! lah!, some of the SAME type of crappy little bugs show up that I recall running into with Mozilla! I believe that Phoenix was done primarily by one person for a while, then handed over to mostly-Mozilla personnel.

Once FireFox looks like a V1.0 product, it seems that sooner or later a AOL/Netscrape/Time/Warner/CNN/Playtex/Frito-Lays/Citibank official will force 'em into grafting on half the world + kitchen sink to compete with MS. If that ever happens, I would hope that a "lite" version would also be available.
 

Mercutio

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One thing that I notice is that FireFox is much better about cleaning up after itself. A week ago I said I had a Firebird process using 1.2GB of RAM+swap, with lots of open tabs.

Opening a similarly large group of tabs with FireFox and RAM usage is stable at around 550MB. Comparing between them it seems FB was holding a lot more data from tabs I closed in virtual memory. I'd ramp up to several hundred open tabs, then close all but one, and its memory utilization would remain outrageous until I closed the last tab.

If I do the same thing with 'fox, RAM usage does drop in line with closed tabs. MUCH better.
 

Buck

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I installed Firefox today, nice little program, and relatively zippy as others have mentioned. Although I did make it crash.
 

CityK

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The inability to turn of the default wrap setting for find as discussed here here and here, is annoying me. Not sure if this is a new bug or by design.
 

LiamC

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I've been using FF 0.8 and if I go to Ace's Hardware forum (and a couple of others) I cannot refresh the page - it just hangs. Next day, a new listing will show, and then it will refuse to update. Clearing the cache doesn't seem to work. We are behind a firewall/proxy, but IE and Moz 1.5 don't have this problem
 

The JoJo

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LiamC said:
I've been using FF 0.8 and if I go to Ace's Hardware forum (and a couple of others) I cannot refresh the page - it just hangs. Next day, a new listing will show, and then it will refuse to update. Clearing the cache doesn't seem to work. We are behind a firewall/proxy, but IE and Moz 1.5 don't have this problem

Works for me.
 

CityK

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Another little thing that pisses me off with TB/FF: say you have a couple of tabs open already. Then say you wanted to also open all the links from one of your bookmark folders. Problem is selecting "open in tabs" causes all of your existing tabs to be used when opening the links from the bookmark folder! Why? Why not just open them in new tabs?
 
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