What about Camino????

Now if somebody will just fix bug 209135 it will be darn near perfect.

Oh, but please get automatic plugin installation working half way decently first. (I know Asa agrees with this.)

The thing that bugs me the most about Mozilla Firebird comments relate to its version number. Just because it's at version 0.5, 0.6, or whatever, that doesn't mean that it's unstable and early in development. Maybe it would help to publicize moret that it's based on Mozilla, which is at 1.4 now. If something at 1.4 isn't stable, then I'm not sure what is.

Does Safari suffer from incorrect MIME whatever bug like Mz/Firebird ? If Safari could, why not with Firebird ?

> Just because it's at version 0.5, 0.6, or
> whatever, that doesn't mean that it's unstable
> and early in development.

Actually, yes it does. The rendering engine is stable and all. The UI is nowhere close (with XXX placeholders in places). Very much 0.6-quality, as the developers state.

The thing can confuses me is that people are happier with a simplied preferences pane, but sometimes that just means that web pages become more busy.

For example, when I grabbed a copy of Firebird for OS X a couple of months ago, I had to track down that to stop the evil blink tag, I had to add this:
user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);
to
~/Library/Phoenix/Profiles/default/8jj8l/user.js

How would looking through some preference panes for a "Allow blinking text" checkbox be harder than the net search to find and implement that solution?

I'm not sure I ever quite figured out how to turn off (similarly evil) animated gifs. I want to my web pages to be as un-animated as possible.

Camino, which also has "simplified" preferences suffers the same problems.

Along similar lines, Firebird was completely un-useable until I figured out to add
user_pref("general.smoothScroll", false);
to the user.js file.

I also wanted to do to change the cache location,
but the solution I found doesn't work:
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory","/UsersNotBackedUp/twp/PheonixCache");
Maybe that was for another browser variation on the Mozilla theme? If so, what will Firebird recognize? These non-trivial questions would become moot if the Preferences handled this.

At the moment, Firebird was just too buggy for regular use. But I'm still watching its development with interest and applaud much of its direction. My comments are meant only as constructive feedback.

Oh, another practical matter -- shouldn't the plugin mechanism have some sort of signing mechanism? Firebird definitely needed a few plugins to have the desired basic functionality I desired, but it seems that any one of them could compromise a system or user account. Perhaps some of the most useful to large numbers of people could be reviewed by the Firebird project in some way to look for backdoors and other trojan behavior and then signed to indicate that they were thus reviewed? Just a thought. I'm thinking out loud. But I think the potential for trojan activity should be recognized.

Travis: though I appreciate that those features (turning off the BLINK tag and stopping GIF animations) are important to you, the whole UI focus of this new generation of simpler browsers (Firebird, Safari, Camino) has been to pare the preferences down to the essence of what a typical, non-geek user NEEDS to be able to alter to comfortably browse the web. Does a grandmother searching for cookie recipes need to move her browser's cache? Does an elementary school teacher using the browser in a classroom need to disable animated GIFs? The needs of the many [simplicity] have been (correctly, IMO) balanced against the desires of the few [atomic control of every possible option].

I think there is some confused thinking here.
It is surely a good idea to avoid cluttering the configuration mechanism with purely technical issues - though it is a mistake to build a system without some reasonably easy means of configuring them - perhaps in a separate config file, or 'Advanced' dialogs.
However, animated Gifs and blink relate to the fundamental function of the program - the browsing experience - and can be really annoying to any browser user. I think the granny and the school teacher would probably want to turn them off if they knew it was possible - especially the school teacher, having to compete for the kids attention with an animation of a fruit machine.
I can't see how options that are on a tabbed dialog that they never open can possibly frighten these users.
I think it's important not to overreact to perceived problems with an application by removing useful features