I consider Mozilla to be just about indispensable at this point. Browsing the web with IE is a painful, popup-ridden experience. I avoid IE whenever possible.

Posted by: Ross Judson at June 7, 2003 03:18 PM

Hey Mitch, it's great that you're going through this pain. I've tried before to emulate Mitch switching to Mozilla, but got nowhere. I said then that they should make Mozilla behave like IE in every way possible, that's how Microsoft would do it if the tables were turned. Now the Real Mitch is doing it. Cool.

BTW, people often blame the blogging tool for missing features in the browser. It's a natural thing to do. With Manila and Radio we leverage a great editor built into MSIE (okay, a so-so editor, but it's great compared to what else is out there) and people think we didn't care about Mozilla users or Mac users, but the editor was only available in MSIE/Win.

Anyway, I'll watch this thread with much interest.

Posted by: Dave Winer at June 7, 2003 03:26 PM

I'm sure you don't want to switch to ANOTHER browser now, but I too and sticky about fit-and-finish issues and Mozilla Firebird has recently won me over: http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2003/may/mozillafirebird

Dave - you should check out Firebird too - with the Luna theme, I often get it confused with IE.

Posted by: Steven Garrity at June 7, 2003 03:28 PM

Pardon the two posts (and the tangent), but Dave - you might be interested in the work that's going on with HTMLArea (http://www.interactivetools.com/iforum/Open_Source_C3/htmlArea_v3.0_-_Alpha_Release_F14/htmlArea_3%3A_Alpha_release_P7101/). It is based on the same type of WYSIWYG editor that Radio uses, but the next version will work on Mozilla as well (thanks to recent updates in Mozilla).

Posted by: Steven Garrity at June 7, 2003 03:30 PM

I'll second that recommendation for FireBird. Mozilla just isn't designed for end users in my opinion - it has hundreds of toys for web developers and control freaks (just take a look at the preferences for proof of that) but the overall product ends up bloated and unfriendly. FireBird on the other hand takes Mozilla's excellent rendering engine and wraps it in an excellent interface. You get all the best bits of Mozilla (tabs, popup blocking, the fantastic feeling of not using IE) with a much less crufty interface.

In my opinion, IE just isn't worth using any more. It hasn't improved in nearly 2 years, and is seriously lacking as a browser for non-casual web surfers.

Incidentally, now that you've got Mozilla be sure to try out the mouse gestures addon - I find it indispensable. http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/

Posted by: Simon Willison at June 7, 2003 03:42 PM

I agree with Steven; you might find Firebird to be a much more robust app than the full Mozilla suite. The UI is definitely much more user-centric (read: "slimmed down"), and is all-in-all a slicker lizard.

Good luck with Mozilla, though; it only gets better from here!

Posted by: Ethan Marcotte at June 7, 2003 03:45 PM

Mitch: Another nod to Firebird, which is currently *this* close to pushing IE off my taskbar. The WYSIWYG issues are all that's holding me back, really, and I've been a fan of IE for years.

Oh, and if you're feeling experimental when it comes to comments, you can try out the ping2talk service I've implemented for MT users. You send a Trackback ping, it creates a new thread, and then that thread pings your blog with the URL.

http://journurl.com/support/users/admin/index.cfm/mode/article/entry/494/

Posted by: Roger Benningfield at June 7, 2003 04:02 PM

A number of people have suggested switching to Firebird (formerly Phoenix). This is a version of the browser using the Gecko core but without a lot of extras of Mozilla. I was under the impression the code base wasn't sufficiently mature for everyday use, but let me know if your experience is different. Also, what's the scoop on transitioning from Mozilla to Firebird as far as bookmarks, cookies, and passwords go?

Posted by: Mitch Kapor at June 7, 2003 04:05 PM

Mitch, if you want to stick with MovableType consider using Kung-Log as your blog editor. It's an OS X application and its donation-ware. I'm quite impressed by its "fit and finish". It's available at: http://kung-foo.tv/kunglog.php

Posted by: Luther Huffman at June 7, 2003 04:05 PM

My experience sounds vastly different; Firebird's been my primary browser for the past 8-10 months, and I've been very happy with its stability and speed.

As for moving bookmarks, cookies, and passwords over, it should be painless; simply copy the requisite files from one profile folder (http://texturizer.net/firebird/edit.html#profile) to the other. Bookmarks are stored in "bookmarks.html", cookies in "cookies.txt", and passwords in the XXXXXXXX.s file. Haven't ported passwords over myself, but it should be fine.

I'd also second the vote for the excellent Mouse Gestures extension. The Tabbrowser extension is also a great one:

http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html#Tabbrowser%20Extensions

As an aside, the Firebird Help site (http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.html) is an excellent resource not only for general tech support, but also for customizing/optimizing the app.

Posted by: Ethan at June 7, 2003 04:19 PM

A MozillaZine discussion thread on saving/exporting passwords from NS7 to Firebird--same principles should apply:

http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12115

Posted by: Ethan Marcotte at June 7, 2003 04:21 PM

Getting the editing buttons in MT:

http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/rich_text_editing_in_movable_type.html

Posted by: Phil Ringnalda at June 7, 2003 04:38 PM

As Phil points out, it's possible to get buttons that work for Mozilla in MT, and we're planning an upcoming revision to have those enabled by default. At the time that feature was added, Mozilla didn't support the necessary javascripting.

And I wholeheartedly agree on the recommendation of Firebird. If you're using a Mozilla browser and not on the Mac, Firebird's the best possible choice.

Posted by: Anil at June 7, 2003 04:56 PM

I find Mozilla and Firebird indespensible for web development. The amount of informaiton they show you in page info, along with all the usefull plugins to show the headers, disable stylesheets, outline tables, identiy forms, and convert post-s to get-s is just amazing compared to IE, not to mention tabbed btrowsing.

All browsing the web things aside for IE, it's just plain painful to develop websites sometimes in IE.

Posted by: Chris at June 7, 2003 07:03 PM

I'll give another BIG thumbs up for Firebird. I've been an IE fan for a long time, and wasn't ever that enamored by Mozilla. Essentially, I'd never come across a browser as customizable, fast, and feature-rich as Internet Explorer.

That was until Firebird, of course. It's now my default browser and I'm thrilled with it. It's light, fast as hell, has some great features that IE was a pain in the ass about (viewing source for example, and way better bookmark management, automatic pop-up blocking), and has features IE wishes it had (like tabbed browsing).

Given its open source, folks are also creating loads of browser plug-ins and add-ons that give you more features. One I installed allows me to scroll through tabs.

Installing the Flash plug-in was a pain, but otherwise it's brilliant.

Posted by: Anthony Baker at June 7, 2003 07:51 PM

Either Mozilla users make up a larger percentage of the market than is widely reported (>1%) or they are just a more vocal group. Its weird how much talk there is about Mozilla and its variants, not only on tech-related blogs, but in ZDNet talkbacks, and even un-tech-related hangouts. Mozilla is often in the news (the recent Firebird naming fiasco made news.com and others), and yet when I talk to friends or people at work, its completely foreign to them. The browser simply does not exist--Netscape's existence is barely acknowledged at this point either.

I just find it a bit curious that Mozilla users make up less than 1% of the overall market...it FEELS like at least 5-10%...

I am a faithful Firebird user by the way...

Posted by: MikeyC at June 7, 2003 09:52 PM

I was a bit hesitant to try Firebird given the 0.6 version number, but have been pleasantly suprised with it's speed, features, and stability. It beats IE on all three counts and has become my default browser on all my computers. In addition, it's the only browser that has come close to weaning my wife off of IE. (She's also tried Moz and Opera.) She is down to just one site she *has* to use IE to visit, and she cringes through the pop-up ads when she does.

My favorite plug-in is Optimoz Mouse Gestures, which gives you Opera-like mouse gesture support. Mouse gestures, like TiVo, falls into the category of hard to explain things that once you get, you wonder how you lived without.

The only warning is to be careful when installing Flash:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/phoenixwin.html

Posted by: Joe at June 7, 2003 10:03 PM

I use MacOS X and Mozilla has been my browser of choice since the day I first unpacked my G4 from its box.

The only time I use MSIE for MacOS X is to sell something on eBay --- eBay pretty much requires that you use IE because it's the only thing they seem to QA-test. Put another way, the Sell-Your-Item flow only works safely under MSIE, at least in my experience.

But other than that and the occasional check to see how Safari is coming along, Mozilla is it.

Posted by: Brian Dear at June 7, 2003 10:58 PM

Just made the switch to Firebird yesterday. 3rd or 4th attempt to leave IE and this time it looks like it might finally stick. That MT hack was one of the few issues I had left. Highly recommend the Googlebar extension, can't switch without the Google toolbar. Having tabs is great, especially with the Tabbrowser extension. Also discovered As-U-Type while trying to replace ieSpell. Not open source, but its a pretty amazing app if you are a bad speller. Be warned I've only used it for a day though. Implements red underline spellchecking *everywhere* you type, good stuff.

All in all Firebird feels like a winner. Could well mean the only Microsoft app I use regularly is the OS itself.

Posted by: William Blaze at June 7, 2003 11:09 PM

I've been using what is currently called Firebird as my main browser for the last 9 or so months, and love it. The main Mozilla browser always felt too clunky for my liking.

mozilla.org seems to recognize that the way to lift the Mozilla profile is to push the Firebird browser to the front. The next major release after 1.4 is slated to have Firebird as the main mozilla.org browser (see http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html).

Posted by: Martin Kenny at June 8, 2003 05:09 AM

Try SlimBrowser: http://www.flashpeak.com/sbrowser/sbrowser.htm

It's an IE based browser w/ lots os features found in Mozilla.

Posted by: Anon at June 8, 2003 07:13 AM

I recently tried Firebird after Joel Spolsky mentioned switching in his weblog. It's much cleaner than the versions of Mozilla I had tried out, and to my great surprise given its 0.6 version number, I never looked back to IE.

Installation consisted of unzipping into a directory. There was no installation program, just a few questions to answer the first time I ran the executable.

I did nothing special to import IE bookmarks, but when I looked in the Bookmarks menu they were all there under a submenu named Imported IE Favorites.

A lot of sites that I had marginally annoying problems with, including Scripting News that used to take forever to appear some days under IE, now just work.

The popup blocking and easy per-site handling of cookie and image blocking is a lifesaver.

I understand that the main Mozilla roadmap will be merging with Firebird as of the next version, 1.5.

Posted by: Sidney Markowitz at June 8, 2003 09:42 AM

From what I've seen, you still need to use IE to handle Windows Update. I've also had one issue with downloads ... I think they were through a proxy server. Otherwise, I have really enjoyed Firebird on Windows for the little bit I've used it. It's more like the browsers I'm used to on the Mac, where I spend most of my time (previously with IE and then Chimera/Camino, and now Safari).

Posted by: Jeremy Reichman at June 8, 2003 12:50 PM

I just tried Firebird. Feels speedy. I get a really poor experience with Exchange2k Outlook Web Access pages tho, it could be the server deciding that I am an unsupported client and sending me highly defeatured pages. OWA pages with IE make heavy use of DHTML and so I suspect the exchange server is picky about what clients it supports fully.

Posted by: john ludwig at June 8, 2003 03:22 PM

For additional assistance with installing plug-ins for Mozilla or Firebird, be sure to check out the official FAQs:

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/index.html

Especially useful is the Windows Registry file for Firebird:

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/resources/firebird.reg

Once the Firebird entries are added to your Windows Registry, some plug-ins will work automatically, and others will install into Firebird's plug-ins directory more easily.

Posted by: Michael Alderete at June 8, 2003 09:45 PM

I've followed Mozilla since its 0.x days when it was practically unusable to now where it is a viable alternative to IE. However, Mozilla's UI is still a little off compared to the rest of the Windows UI. I like the Opera browser as well but my favorite is CrazyBrowser

http://www.crazybrowser.com

It's free, uses the IE engine, has tabbed browsing and blocks pop-up ads. It just feels "smoother" to me than Moz and sad to say but most sites are "optimized" for IE and things generally work and look better using an IE engine than Moz or Opera.

However, the one thing I do use Moz for is as my primary e-mail client. It's been great and stable and I'm looking forward to trying out their standalone mail client once it's out of alpha.

Posted by: TechnicalOutlook at June 8, 2003 10:23 PM

The solutions for the MT text editing issues are at http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/rich_text_editing_in_movable_type.html and http://kalsey.com/2003/05/mt_text_formatting_buttons_in_mozilla/

Posted by: Stan at June 8, 2003 11:14 PM

Just another vote for FireBird. I use it exclusively at work on a Win2k machine, where it superior in every way to IE. At home, while I still use Konq and Galeon a lot, I'm slowly switching over to Firebird. The UI is much better thought-out than Moz's, very slick and elegant, not cluttered-up and illogical like Mozilla. Stability is excellent. It has every power-user feature I've gotten used to in browsers like Konqueror and Galeon, without becoming a slow hog.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

Posted by: Avdi at June 10, 2003 10:00 AM

What? No mention of OPERA?!? Most of the features mentioned for Phoenix/Firebird (mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, etc.) were the sincerest form of flattery for this smooth fit-n-finish Norwegian product. Throw in all the sidebar options, speed, download mgmt. and the superb M2 mail & news package and I can't see another browser in sight. Toss 'em the $40 as a vote of confidence!

Posted by: Kevin at June 10, 2003 02:34 PM

Opera's UI just isn't well thought out. It's a total power-user UI, with buttons and sidebars everywhere. Firebird is clean and elegant compared to the bloated mess that is Opera.

Posted by: Will at June 10, 2003 08:55 PM

These bookmarklets let you move passwords and cookies from any browser to any other browser, one site at a time:

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#view_passwords
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/misc.html#transfer_cookies

I agree that Mozilla should have the ability to import bookmarks, cookies, and passwords directly from IE.

Posted by: Jesse Ruderman at June 10, 2003 09:06 PM

I also want to pipe in support for Firebird. I've worked at Netscape for several years and have been doing work on the web for longer than that. Firebird seems to be very fast and benefits from the stability of the mozilla codebase. I actually did something unexpected for me : I hadnt tried Firebird for OSX (my main platform) before today, but after downloading it and trying it out, I shucked Camino and moved over to FB. It's really stinking fast on OSX. I exported my bookmarks from camino and imported them without a hitch. I'd say FB is as fast as Safari if not faster in some respects...

Anyway to Mitch I'd say - keep mozilla in one profile. Try out Firebird as well but dont uninstall Mozilla till you feel like you are comfortable with it. Firebird I'd say is probably going to be _more_ stable - it's less code, less fluctuation and is having a growing base of extension builders as well as theme creators... Like others said, you can get a skin for FB that makes it look almost identical to IE.

Posted by: Andrew Wooldridge at June 10, 2003 10:57 PM

I use Firebird whenever possible on my Windows machine (desktop) and my Linux based laptop. Its fast, suprisingly stable (more so than even IE6), has a decent tabbed browsing interface (though MyIE2, the shell for IE, has a much better interface where you can close tabs with a double click, open all favorates, add groups, open groups, etc. all in tabs) and also has a great popup blocker. The only downfall to Firebird that I've seen is that it still doesn't work on some webpages.

I have to use IE 6 to get into my schools portal which generally sucks. Thats the fault of the portal company though and not Mozillas, it doesn't realize that Mozilla/Firebird and Netscape 7 are the same browser.

Posted by: Chris at June 11, 2003 06:49 AM

I just learned of Mozilla Firebird a week ago, and decided to download it and try it out. One word: wow. This browser is fast, powerful, stable, intuitive to use, and easy to customize - in short, everything that I'd ever looked for in a browser. I have not yet had this browser crash on me, and I've used it for at least 40 hours over the past week. The reason why so much of the world uses MSIE is because it's convenient - it comes with Windows. If people knew about Firebird AND could be persuaded to install it, use of this browser would skyrocket. As for me, I'm not going back.

Posted by: Ruth at June 11, 2003 07:06 PM

I just learned of Mozilla Firebird a week ago, and decided to download it and try it out. One word: wow. This browser is fast, powerful, stable, intuitive to use, and easy to customize - in short, everything that I'd ever looked for in a browser. I have not yet had this browser crash on me, and I've used it for at least 40 hours over the past week. The reason why so much of the world uses MSIE is because it's convenient - it comes with Windows. If people knew about Firebird AND could be persuaded to install it, use of this browser would skyrocket. As for me, I'm not going back.

Posted by: Ruth at June 11, 2003 07:06 PM

Firebird is powerful enough to make MS consider getting IE out of semi-retirement... I made it my default browser about a week ago and it's been a more than pleseant week so far...

Posted by: Nav at June 12, 2003 09:15 AM

Short comment: Mozilla Firebird is great.

I've used Mozilla (and it's children galeon, chimera, camino, etc...) for a good amount of time now. There have always been some concessions though. I've recently started using Firebird at work on w2k as well as home on my Debian and Mac machines. At work I don't even have to open up IE just to access the internal website any longer, happy day! Firebird is easily the best browser I've used so far. Highly recommended.

Posted by: billy sneed at June 12, 2003 10:40 AM

Here's my vote: don't waste time on Firebird yet. The 0.6 is there for a reason.

I'm a long-term Mozilla user, since way back when we knew it was a bit buggy and slow but hey it rendered CSS better than IE - that's before even the Netscape 6 release (coincidentally, that was also Mozilla 0.6), which never should have happened.

Meanwhile, I have of course tried Firebird. It's (a little bit) buggy and (fairly significantly) unfinished.

Neither of these problems make it unusable, but if you've just switched to Mozilla and you're doing okay, I would hold right there until Firebird 1.0 when it will become 'Mozilla Browser' i.e. the will have received the full concentration of Mozilla development team.

There's just no need for somebody who doesn't want to be a 'power user' on the 'bleeding edge' to use Firebird when Mozilla does a great job of browsing, doesn't crash, and doesn't have bits missing right left and centre. Firebird is the future but unless you are a must-be-there-first kid (which seems unlikely if you only just now switched to Mozilla) I would wait.

I really think people (yes including Joel Spolsky) are recommending Firebird too early. Sure it's good, but you get most of that goodness (minus a few IE-clone keystrokes and a slightly different UI) with the current, mature Mozilla 1.4 or whatever. For the extra Firebird goodness, wait a few months while they finish the polish.

--sam

Posted by: sam at June 13, 2003 02:41 AM

Mitch,

I don't know so many people praise a browser only avenue. With the Mozilla suite, it's all functional with one download. Who wants to chase after tabbed browsing extensions, email, irc, newsgroup readers when they are all in the suite. And some settings in Firebird are not reachable unless you use the about:config method. I would recommend Firebird to my grandmother, she would never wonder about what she was missing. You eventually will want more.
MozillaNotBrowser rules.

Posted by: john woods at June 16, 2003 09:06 AM

There is now a decent editor plugin for Mozilla, called Mozile -

http://mozile.mozdev.org/

It uses DOM and scripting to get its effects. Check it out - looks good.

Posted by: Tom Passin at June 17, 2003 10:37 AM

Some interesting comments by all here, but as a long-time convert to Opera, I'm baffled. Geez, Opera v7.11 SMOKES.

o tabbed windowing
o integrated searching ("g mitch kapor chandler" saves going to google first or other search sites)
o one-click skinning if you hate the UI
o better auto-complete URLs (means never having to type in www or .com ever again)
o one-click password manager
o fast-forward and rewind buttons is a nice innovation beyond the forward-back button paradigm - meaning "shift-Z" does a snapback like Safari, which I found very useful)
o highlighting on text allows one via context menu to search, get definition, goto URL if it's not clickable, get a translation, etc...)
o mouse gestures saves keystrokes and cursor movement
o two-button mouse actions let you go fwd-back without going up to buttons - more time efficiency.
o two-button mouse and scroll wheel lets you scroll through open tabbed windows
o "X" and "Z" let you go forward/back respectively without taking hands of the keyboard (backspace goes back, also, as does IE/Moz).
o cusomizable toolbar and buttons takes a right-click to get rid of the clutter
o F8 highlights address bar to type in URL - no wasted motion using a mouse again
o auto-fill for personal info
o ...and it's really fast
o ...and Oslo pushes hard for only web-standard coding

All my friends/colleagues contort their face after I get them to download it and take 3 minutes to train them. "Why didn't I know about this before??"

And Opera7 is about 99% with page displays given it has an IE browser ID tag that's configurable back to Opera when visit a Microsoft web developer's site.

Am I missing something about why Opera isn't even on your guys' minds? Because it's not open source? Hmm.

Cheers,
Kam

Posted by: kamalesh at June 19, 2003 10:49 AM

This comment is a bit late. But you may want to try Cain & Abel (http://www.oxid.it/) to restore your Internet Explorer passwords.

This works, because IE only obscured the data, but does not encrypt them. Mozilla can do real encription if you ask it to do so. Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Passwords -> Use encryption when storing data.

Posted by: Patrice at June 20, 2003 07:01 AM

Firebird rocks!

The only problem I have with it concerning web development is that it gets all of my CSS code right. The problem then is of course IE hoses it all up so I have to fix so it works with IE. Mozilla/Gecko is just too good for web developers.

Posted by: Paul S at June 21, 2003 12:37 PM

I am using FireBird. I tried to switch to the Mac, but was really unhappy with the missing features and programs, etc. So I came back to the trusty PC. Not so design, but works. But what I inherited from the Mac world, is to use Firebird and Openoffice.org.

Firebird still has some quirks and is unpolished, but I am happy to use something non Microsoft.

I've seen Mozilla, but it is too big, too complex and ugly for me.

I also spend a little time to invest in submitting request for new features, for tech envangelism (to tell sites if they are not Gecko compatible), and some bugs if I find any.

But these guys at Firebird could look on Safari, too (Macintosh). What I really liked in Safari, is in place bookmark editing, editing bookmarks without pop-up windows.

Posted by: Kozak Imre at June 30, 2003 11:07 PM

Mozilla on the PC? Excellent. Mozilla on the Mac? Fugettaboutit. Use Safari.

Posted by: Wendy Rebecca at July 1, 2003 07:19 AM