Mozilla Firebird Help

Mozilla Firebird™ is a free, open-source web browser for Windows and Linux and is based on the Mozilla codebase. It is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advantages over Internet Explorer, such as the ability to block pop-up windows. Read more about the browser at the Mozilla Firebird Project Page.

Mozilla is an open-source web browser and toolkit, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability. Mozilla.org provides binaries for testing and feedback. For more about mozilla.org, read Mozilla at a Glance.

Mozilla is a complete suite of web related applications, such as a browser, a mail/news client, a chat client and much more. Mozilla Firebird is just a browser, which makes it a better choice if you already have a mail client for example. Also, since Mozilla Firebird is smaller than the whole Mozilla suite, it's also faster and easier to use.

Note, though, that Mozilla Firebird is not just the standalone Mozilla browser. The user interface in Mozilla Firebird differs from Mozilla in many ways. For example, Mozilla Firebird has customizable toolbars.

To download Mozilla Firebird, go to the Download page on this site.

Strictly speaking, you don't install Mozilla Firebird. You just unzip/untar the compressed file and place it in a folder of your choice. Windows users: just run MozillaFirebird.exe. Linux users: just run the MozillaFirebird script. If you want shortcuts for Mozilla Firebird, you will have to create them manually.

Future versions of Mozilla Firebird will probably have a real installer. Until then, there's a great installer for Windows, provided by Seb Delahaye. This installer will create optional shortcuts for Mozilla Firebird and is available for both the releases and the nightly builds.

Releases are generally more stable versions of Mozilla Firebird that should probably be downloaded by the first-time user. Nightly builds are released every night and contain the very latest changes, including new features and bugs. Don't expect everything to work in the nightly builds. (Well, don't expect everything to work in the releases either!)

Possibly. Since Mozilla Firebird is an open-source project, contributors are constantly translating Mozilla Firebird into other languages. You can check if Mozilla Firebird is available in your language on the official release page.

Mozilla Firebird is a web browser only, not a complete web solution. However, the Mozilla developers are actually working on a standalone mail/news client which will also be based on the Mozilla codebase. It will be designed to have a similar user interface as Mozilla Firebird. The project has now officially launched and I am proud to announce the new helpsite for the mail client: Thunderbird Help!

Yes, but XFT support isn't enabled by default. To use it, there are three ways:

• You can make your own personalized build using Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird sources (to enable XFT, add "ac_add_options --enable-xft" to your .mozconfig)
• If you are a Red Hat 8.0 user, you can download the unofficial and unsupported builds with XFT support here: http://www.sitemason.com/page/eCIDQc
• You can download a Mozilla build with XFT support enabled from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/experimental/xft/ and replace the file MozillaFirebird/components/libgfx_gtk.so by the one from the Mozilla build you downloaded.

Mozilla Firebird stores your personal settings, such as the cache and your web form data, in a profile folder. The Profile Manager is used to manage multiple profiles but can also be used to start Mozilla Firebird in offline browsing mode. To start the Profile Manager, run Mozilla Firebird with the -p switch. On Windows, follow these steps:

1. Close Mozilla Firebird completely (select File > Exit from the menu).
2. Select Start > Run... from the Windows Start menu.
3. Enter the full path to Mozilla Firebird, enclosed with quotation marks, then add the -p switch, e.g.:
   "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firebird\MozillaFirebird.exe" -p

Once started, you are able to add, remove or rename profiles. Note that if you have more than one profile, you will be asked which profile to use each time you start Mozilla Firebird.

If Mozilla Firebird crashes, you'll see a program called Talkback appear, asking you to send information about the crash. Asa Dotzler of mozilla.org has written a good explanation of what Talkback is:

Talkback is a client application and server (plus server infrastructure and development/administration people) contributed to mozilla.org by Netscape. mozilla.org, many years ago, agreed to make an exception and include this product with our binary nightly and milestone distributions even though it's not open source because it provides huge value in debugging and isolating stability issues. Talkback has been used to identify and debug thousands of major crash bugs in Mozilla over the years and we're very happy to be able to include it in the Mozilla Firebird testing builds.

How it works: A Talkback binary is packaged up with the Mozilla Firebird browser binary. When the browser crashes, the Talkback application is triggered and it offers the user the option to participate. If a user says no then nothing happens. If a user agrees to help the Mozilla effort by submitting crash data then she is prompted with optional fields for including her email address, the URL that triggered the crash and a comment. That user-entered data along with a stacktrace of the crash is sent to a Talkback server at Netscape which is accessible to many of the Mozilla developers. In aggregate, all of the crash data can very quickly point out specific problems being encountered by large groups of users. A small team of engineers pour through these aggregate reports and turn them into bugzilla bugs with good debug information which leads to quick fixing of the most high-profile stability problems. To see some of these bugs, query bugzilla for the keywords topcrash and topcrash+

What's coming: Netscape Talkback engineers are working on improvements to the client UI as well as providing a mechanism to make more of the data publically available. The goal is that users will be able to search for their own crash reports as well as see more of the aggregate data.

What else: Talkback is not spyware, adware or anything of the like. Users are clearly prompted and asked to submit the report. User data unrelated to the Mozilla crash isn't at all useful to us. We only care about making Mozilla more stable. If you don't want to help Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird become more stable by submitting your crash reports then don't. No data is being sent without your explicit consent. I'd encourage anyone that wants to see this browser improve to submit those reports. They are very, very helpful. But, like I said, if you don't want to, then don't. Just remember that we can't fix the bugs we can't identify. If you're happy seeing the same crash over and over then don't worry about sending in that report.

For Windows, this popular plugin can be found here. For Linux users, this plugin should work. Download the file, close Mozilla Firebird completely (File > Exit) and run the installation. In the dialog that appears, click on the Other browser... button. There you must specify the path to the plugin folder for Mozilla Firebird. You should know in what folder you installed Mozilla Firebird. In that folder, there's a sub-folder called "plugins". Select that folder and click Select, then click Install.

To install Java for Windows, click here. For Linux, click here.

There is a project for Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird called PluginDoc, which might be helpful for you. It is a list of common plugins (such as RealPlayer, QuickTime, etc.) and how to install them in Mozilla Firebird.

Mozilla Firebird Extensions is the name for various enhancements to the browsing experience in Mozilla Firebird. They can be thought of as small programs (or plug-ins) that add new functionality to Mozilla Firebird. Take a look at the various extensions on the Extensions page.

The great thing about extensions is that it allows Mozilla Firebird to stay small and unbloated. Anyone who requires more features can download the appropriate extension.

You can't do that yet. Future releases of Mozilla Firebird will have an uninstall ability for the extensions. However, you can disable an extension by selecting Tools > Options... > Extensions. Here you are able to select any extension and click Disable. Note that you need to restart the browser after disabling an extension.

You will probably find the features you're missing by installing the Tabbrowser Extensions. It adds such features as close buttons on the actual tabs, an option for the tab closing order, auto reload, crash recovery and much more.

Mouse Gestures is a neat feature taken from the Opera browser that lets you navigate using simple mouse movements. For example, you can go back one page by holding down a button and dragging the mouse to the left. Take a look at the instructions page for more indepth information on how to use this feature. Or just download the extension and try it for yourself.

You can customize the toolbars by choosing which buttons you want to show, by adding toolbars, or by resizing the buttons. To do so, go to View > Toolbars > Customize.... A new window will pop up, containing available toolbar items. Just drag and drop them to the toolbar where you want to add them. To remove some items from the toolbar, drag them from the toolbars and drop them at the Customize window.

You can even place toolbar items on the menu bar! This will allow you to place everything on one row, saving lots of screen real estate.

Mozilla Firebird doesn't yet allow you to move the actual toolbars. This is planned for future releases.

Yes! Please visit the Themes section on this site for a list of the available themes.

See the Keyboard Shortcuts table on this site for a list of the most common keyboard shortcuts.

Yes you can! Learn how to do this in the Tips & Tricks section.

If you are using Windows, you can convert the bookmarks with the help from BookmarkPriest. If you're using Linux, there is a program called bk_edit that allows you to edit and convert Opera 6, Netscape 3/4, Mozilla (including, of course, Mozilla Firebird) and Galeon bookmarks on Linux.

Galeon and Konqueror use the XBEL format to store their bookmarks. Mozilla Firebird can't import directly these files, because Mozilla Firebird bookmarks are stored in HTML, whereas XBEL is XML. However, both Galeon and Konqueror offer the possibility to export your bookmarks to the Mozilla/Netscape format (which is the one used in Mozilla Firebird).

After having exported your bookmarks, just open Mozilla Firebird bookmark manager, and import (File > Import) the newly exported file.

Many sites uses the alt HTML property to display tooltips for images. This is wrong. The correct property to use for tooltips is title. The alt property has a very important purpose, which is to provide replacement text for images in browsers that cannot or do not (by user's choice) display images, and if graphical browsers display them as tooltips people will be discouraged from using them for their correct purpose. For more information about this, read Mozilla Bug 25537. In other words, it's up to the web developers to use the right HTML property for tooltips. If you are in doubt, read here for more information.

However, there is an extension that will enable the display of the alt property as a tooltip. You can install it from the Extensions page.

If you're using Mozilla as your mail client, you've probably noticed that Mozilla Firebird either doesn't do anything or it starts Outlook Express when you click on a mailto link. This is because Mozilla Mail doesn't correctly register itself as the default mailto protocol handler on Windows. You will have to fix this manually.

In Windows XP/2000, select Folder Options in the Control Panel, then click on the File Types tab. Here, browse to the file type called (None) URL:MailTo Protocol and click Advanced. Select the open action and click Edit. Here, uncheck the Use DDE option and specify the full path to mozilla.exe in the Application used to perform action field. Enclose the path in quotation marks and append -mail %1. The result should look something like this:

I haven't tested this in Windows 95/98, but I suspect the approach is similar.

Yes. This is possible using the Tabbed Browsing Extension. After installing the extension, look for the preferences under Advanced > Tabbed Browsing > Advanced > Single Window Mode.

Writing a theme requires knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and is not for the faint of heart. If you have the time to learn, or think that you know a lot about web design, a good first place to look is Creating a Skin for Mozilla.

In addition, the Mozilla DOM Inspector is very useful in trying to figure out what properties to set. This is not available in Firebird by default, but can be added easily if you build your own.

The good folks at Mozilla.org have provided some useful information that can be applied in your userChrome.css file at this link. There are also some tips right here in the Tips and Tricks page.

Firebird will be used as the default browser in Mozilla. The current Mozilla suite will be replaced by stand-alone applications.

No! The project will still be tightly managed, but we think that the increased testing and focus that comes from being the primary mozilla.org application will help Firebird improve faster.

Firebird will be available as the download from mozilla.org after these changes. There will probably be a web installer, which means that you download a 100K installer and then you choose whichever components you want. There should also be an option for the smallest possible .zip download, as exists today.

It looks like the new default Mozilla suite will include Firebird (a.k.a. Mozilla Browser) bundled with a lot of disabled extensions (e.g. Chat, DOM Inspector and Venkman, the Mozilla JavaScript debugger), which can later be uninstalled. These extensions may even include the mail client Thunderbird. When upgrading Firebird, it will remember which extensions are installed and only update them. This means that you'll only have to download the full package once, then you can choose whatever you want from it.

If enough people emerge who want to continue developing the current app-suite, that can happen. However, Mozilla.org's main focus will be on the new suite of standalone applications.

XUL is not going away. Firebird and the new suite of stand-alone applications will still be written in XUL using a cleaned up toolkit (the default widget set). We hope to see all of the Mozilla extensions ported to Firebird and will do what we can to provide the documentation to make that conversion easier.