[GEEK] Okay, Firebird is officially cool

[jducoeur]

I'm been doing some browser transitioning lately. At home, we've entirely switched over to Mozilla, having finally left the dark ages of Netscape 4.79. At work, I have to use Outlook (which is work standard) and IE (to keep track of ASAP integration), but for LJ reading I've recently picked up Mozilla Firebird, the lean-and-mean version of Mozilla.

Now, the really cool thing about Firebird is that it supports a very clean and open plugin technology, and there's a lot available for it. Last week, I picked up Link Toolbar and LinkIt, which support the HTML concept of "related pages" -- an idea that has been in HTML for ages, but which has been mostly ignored by the big-name browsers. The Link Toolbar uses the links that are explicitly in the pages, and LinkIt tries to suss out other pages that might be related.

So I'm sitting here reading LJ, adding a couple of new friends, and I've just noticed that the "Next" button does the right thing when I'm reading comment pages! That is, if I start reading the comments on an LJ entry, and I press the "Next" button, it takes me to the full-comments view of that person's next entry, which is exactly what I want it to do. Neat -- I always like softwares that DWIMs properly...

Comments

[laurion]

Ah Phoenix^H^H^H^^H^HFirebird^H^H^H^H^H^H Firefox! (and we mean it this time, really. No more name changes. Promise.) Is a fantastic browser. And I love the fact that I can throw it onto my USB keychain and take it with me, as it doesn't use any registry entries. Still waiting for them to perfect specifying the profile directory, so it'll be truly portable. And I'm addicted to tabs. Beats the days of having a virtual desktop just for the window clutter of web browsing... Looks like I should go check out LinkIt....

Re:

[tpau]

what is it with everyone and tqabs? i use safari on the laptop and i hate tabs i'd rather have my windows, i guess.

Re: tabs

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Depends on how many sites you keep open at once, I guess. I typically keep my computers running full-time (at home and at work), and multitask myself pretty heavily, so I tend to have dozens of pages up in different tabs. Dozens of windows would be harder to manage. At home, I usually group these into separate windows by topic; for example, I'll have one for video editing, one for whatever programming project I'm working on at the moment, one for some other research topic, and one for miscellaneous. A couple of the ones that turn out to be particularly long-lived tend to get virtual desktops of their own. (It helps that I use galeon at home, which has a couple of features I haven't seen in other browsers yet: it restores the former set of tabs when it starts up, even after a crash; and I can move tabs from one window to another.)

And then there are ephemeral windows. For example, in the morning, when I'm reading industry news, I'll open up CNet in a separate window and then middle-click on all the headlines I want to read; each story will appear in a separate tab, loading in the background, and I can read each one in turn and then close the tab; when I close the last tab, the window goes away. Or, when I want to read comics, I'll click on my comics bookmark and open up all my comics at once, in separate tabs; I'll then read each one as it loads. (Obviously, this is Not Recommended on a modem link. ;-)

Re:

[laurion]

For me, web browsing is primarily about information processing. I read it and process it. So it makes sense to me to keep all of that one task in one window, but grouped appropriately with tabs. Also, I love being able to command-click on a folder full of bookmarks, and have them all load up at once in separate tabs. that way, by the time I'm done with the first one, they're all loaded, no waiting when I go to read them. This is especially true for things like webcomics. Takes me practically no time to read them all at one go. Press a button, there they all are. No urls to remember, no need to go through a long list of bookmarks.

Plus, even when I use different windows (say, one for slashdot, and one for arstechnica), I can follow links off that page while having the subsequent pages retain a context of being grouped with the original page. I typically read a page, opening new tabs for all the links on it that I want to follow, then go through the links I've opened, after reading the whole page. That way I don't lose the thread of what I am doing with the main page just to follow a link off of it. I also find this very handy on LJ, where I can command-click all the cuts, links, and memes that people throw in, without losing the task of reading my LJ friends page.

For me it is absolutely about task management and grouping. From a UI perspective, tabs don't always make sense, given that it can muddle your GOMS, but then again, most UIs aren't designed to handle a boundless array of information coming in from outside sources that needs to be collated and grouped.

In another sense, I wouldn't want my e-mail client to open a new window for every new e-mail message that came in, why would I want my browser to do so for every bookmark I opened, and every link?

Re:

[jducoeur]

I just find tabs a lot easier to manage. I do most of my browsing by opening links in new screens, so I usually find myself with half-a-dozen or more open at a time. They're much easier for me to track if they're all tabs in a single window...

Firefox

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I started using Firefox on Window today (I'm stuck using Windows at work), and I like it, but it's got some holes compared to older Mozillae. Some of these are clearly meant to be fixed eventually (e.g., the absence of a mailer); but others I'm not sure about. For example, I really hope we're going to get the quick-access menus for managing permissions for cookies, popups, etc.; those are extremely handy, but some people might consider them clutter.

And I hope they eventually add the persistence feature of galeon (when you restart after a crash, you get the same tabs back); that's the major advantage that's keeping me from switching to mainline Mozilla on my Linux box.

But as a technology preview, it is extremely impressive. It actually renders faster than IE, despite Microsoft's habitual cheating.

Re: Firefox

[dkapell.livejournal.com]

well, actually, there wont ever be a mailer in firefox, thats what thunderbird is for. (and does really well. firefox is a 'do one thing, do it well' piece of software, and it does.

Re: Firefox

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Ah, then the bit on the roadmap about "mailer integration" must mean cooperation with thunderbird, not compiling them into the same process.

Re: Firefox

[laurion]

Actually, check out the plethora of plugins available for Firefox. There's one called something like 'tab extensions' that I have loaded on my PC that enables the persistent state feature you are asking about. There's also some for cookies and popups as well. One of the really nice things is the easy plugin structure, so that you can have what you want, and I can keep it free of clutter. (From the one man's junk perspective that you brought up...)

And yes, the 'integration' spect is for greater cooperation with Thunderbird, not wholescale integration a la Mozilla. They have _explicitly_chosen to go with a forked project tree rather than a unified one for a number of reasons, all of which have been hashed out on the mozillazine forums.

Re: Firefox

[metageek.livejournal.com]

There's one called something like 'tab extensions' that I have loaded on my PC that enables the persistent state feature you are asking about.

Oh, good! I've been worried about Galeon, which seems to have lost momentum. Definitely time for me to grab Firebird for Linux, then. (And I've been using Evolution as my home mailer anyway--gotta love a mailer that will run your signature randomizer for you--so I won't miss the mail integration here.)

One of the really nice things is the easy plugin structure, so that you can have what you want, and I can keep it free of clutter.

Sounds like emacs. I should definitely look into that API.

Re: Firefox

[siderea]

Allow me to congratulate you on your great pluralization of "Mozilla". I had not previously though about the need for a plural form of "Mozilla", but now that I've got one, I'm looking for excuses to use it. :)

Re: Firefox

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-)

Re: Firefox

[jducoeur]

I'll just emphasize what others have said: check out the extensions. They're incredibly easy to add -- click on the link, confirm, maybe restart. And there's quite an impressive array of them. I had my own complaints about Firebird to start with (for example, it didn't ask me for confirmation about closing a window that had multiple tabs open), but I found extensions to fix each of them. It's by far the most thoroughly customizable browser I've found to date.

I'll admit to being amused at the unstable names, though: I only started using it a few weeks ago, and had no idea that they'd changed the name again...

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Firefox has some neat features. It makes a good alternative browser. I'm hooked on the auto spell checking I get with Safari, though, and until Firefox has something like that, I can't see myself using it extensively. I will, though, grant that the moment of pushing next and previous, when looking at a comment page, and having them do the 'right' thing, is worth savouring.

[asdr83.livejournal.com]

One of the few "enhancements" that laurion made to my desktop(he only sorta asked permission to re-arrange absolutely everything while installing a patch) this year that I was not mad at him for was installing Firebird. I've been using it since September and once I got past my initial resistance to change and annoyance with the boy I found that I really like it and have been pushing my mom and friends to use it. I am not geek enough to understand completely why it's so great, but it is the nicest, most friendly (even to non-geeks) browser I've ever used.

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

I've been using Mozilla since 0.91 and have been very impressed. I cannot live without tabbed browsing.

I just recently downloaded FireFox and gave it a try. Although it's very impressive and seems faster than Mozilla, it's still missing a few critical features:

1) I have my home page in Mozilla set to load 4 seperate tabs when I start: slashdot, my LJ friends page, FARK and Orkut. FireFox cannot yet do this.

2) I use Mozilla as my main email client. I prefer to wait just a little while longer for Thunderbird to mature before converting.

3) AdBlock (blocks banner ads, including Macromedia Flash) is an amazing Mozilla/FireFox plugin. On mozilla, AdBlock works in both the browser and mail client. AdBlock does not work on Thunderbird. See:

http://adblock.mozdev.org