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Mozilla Firebird
Friday, May 23, 2003 12:30 AM

Mozilla Firebird is the browser I've been waiting for.

I've always wished for some of the features Opera and/or Mozilla users have enjoyed for some time: mouse gestures, typeahead link search, easily searchable bookmarks, good PNG support, etc. However, for me, all of those new whizzy features were outweighed by the degree to which Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts were wired into my head. Most of those shortcut keys had equivalents in the alternative browser, but I found them hard to get used to. Besides, both Opera and Mozilla seemed slower (in starting up) than Internet Explorer on my machine.

Fortunately, Firebird addresses every one of my complaints while adding some of the most useful features that Mozilla has and Internet Explorer lacks. For the most part, Firebird's keyboard shortcuts are a strict superset of IE's--they even included the obscure but incredibly useful Ctrl+Enter (adds "http://www." and ".com" to what you have typed in the address bar). But all of the fun new stuff is either present in Firebird or available via Mozilla extensions, which are useful, small, and trivially easy to install.

Anyway, I've switched my default browser to Firebird. It really is that good, even compared to Internet Explorer running on Windows.