Michael Montoure recommended Mozilla Firebird (the browser formerly known as Prince… er, Phoenix) to me a couple weeks ago, and I finally got around to using it instead of Mozilla. I like the smaller footprint; I don’t need an email client, news reader, chat program, and toaster oven with my browser. And although it may not be pulling pages down any faster, the Firebird programmers have toyed with the order in which parts of a page display, so using Firebird feels faster. It’s a subtle difference, but I like it.
Even better, I’ve been playing with some Firebird extensions, and I’ve found a few I really like, some of which also work with vanilla Mozilla.
All-in-One Gestures
Adds mouse gestures for window and tab navigation, on-the-fly image resizing, opening multiple links at once, and many other goodies. It feels a lot like using Graffiti on a Palm OS handheld, only with a mouse instead of a stylus. All-in-One also includes something I’ve missed ever since I switched from IE: middle-click autoscrolling. Rotating the mouse wheel to get through long pages does evil things to my wrists, and it’s nice to be able to leisurely scroll by twitching the mouse a little.
Download Statusbar
Creates a subtle auto-hide status bar that shows the progress of file downloads in miniature. Most of the information I want about a download is available at a glance (percentage complete, download speed), and even more is available by hovering the mouse over the file’s progress indicator. It’s much less obtrusive than the download dialogs that normally appear, but all the vital statistics are still there.
Tabbrowser Extensions
Opens up a whole can of customization on the tabbed browsing interface. Drag and drop tabs to rearrange them, organize tabs into colored groups, Ctrl+click history and bookmark links to open them in tabs, and do a million other tabby things that I’ll probably never use.
