First thoughts: Mozilla Firebird 0.6

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 was released today. One of the new features is an official Mac OS X version (there have been unofficial builds of Phoenix floating around for a while). The release notes promise that “it’s still quite rough around the edges,” and this is definitely true. So I will avoid commenting on problems or glitches in the Mac OS X version for another few releases (and I will continue to use Safari and/or Camino).

One thing amuses me, though: The context menu for the Firebird toolbar icons give you an option to customize the toolbars, with a dialog very similar to Mac OS X’s native toolbar support (e.g., Cocoa’s NSToolbar). In fact, Firebird even goes to some trouble to simulate a sheet. Except on Mac OS X, where the toolbar customization window appears just like any other document window, complete with title bar. Mac OS X, of course, is the only OS that has native sheet support, and what no doubt inspired the dialog’s appearance on other platforms. I find this a little ironic.

One thought on “First thoughts: Mozilla Firebird 0.6

  1. Mac support in Firebird (which is at this point primarily designed as a Windows browser that also runs elsewhere) is an afterthought. You’re probably seeing the effect of XUL support on Mac not being up to Windows levels.

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