Mozilla Firebird Builds with Installer Now Available for WindowsFriday November 7th, 2003David Hallowell writes: "After a lot of hard work by Ben [Goodger], the official Mozilla Firebird installer is now available, so just like the Mozilla suite you have the option of the installer or the zip file. The installer builds are available from the usual location ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firebird/nightly/latest-trunk. "Unlike the app suite, the installer version of Mozilla Firebird does not use the GRE." Wouldn't it be cooler if one could use webinstall, like the unoffical builds Why doesn't it use the GRE? I thought the whole point to switching to Firebird/Thunderbird is that at some point the GRE would be used. The GRE takes a bit of a performance hit with Mozilla Firebird. Hence it's not in there now. Understandable if you ask me. This clearly isn't the place to ask, but I'm still interested to know whether the perf. hit from GRE is a) Only relevant to startup speed b) Basically an unavoidable consequence of using gecko as a dynamically linked external library rather than as a statically compiled part of firebird I suspect that both of these things are true. I'd also like to see *how much* of a hit we're talking. Is it 1000%, 100%, 10% 1%, 0.1%? I'd guess O(10%), but without numbers this is really a wild guess. I asked bryner this same question recently (since Ben claimed bryner was the one who had done the measurements). His response was, in loose paraphrase, "We're using those perf test results for something? We should redo the measurements -- I did them a long time ago and only on Mac. I have no idea how relevant they are to today's situation." Only the installer do NOT use GRE ... I thought it is winamp's installer (If I'm right) but haven't try it yet. Tried the installer and I take back my last post. But it's very buggi for now. I said the installer version of Firebird, not the installer itself. The installer is Mozilla's own installer with a lot of work by Ben to improve it. Ben mentioned in a previous post that the GRE wasn't going to be used in Firebird (at least for the moment) because of a slight performance hit. However, I think this puts Thunderbird and any other Mozilla standalone apps at a disadvantage as well as making Mozilla less attractive for embedders. Without the GRE means that downloading Firebird + Thunderbird will be a lot bigger than download of the app suite, also means that running the two together involves loading two sets of effectively the same libraries into memory. Now if you want to also download the standalone composer and calendar then there's a lot of resource wastage. Firebird is very quickly becoming the best browser, bar none, although not all design decisions I agree with (e.g. I prefer the search item in the urlbar auto complete rather than a separate search bar). With the right promotion I can see Firebird becoming a very popular application. The success of Firebird could increase the appeal of Gecko to embeddors, but only if it uses the GRE. No Win32 app developer wants to include all the gecko libs in a download of their application when they can embed IE easily. However, if a lot of people have the GRE installed already then it makes the gecko option more attractive, it'd be easy to code an installer that checked for the presence of the GRE and if it's not available then downloaded that component. Yes i prefered the Search in the Autocomplete URL list too. I feel the seperate text box is unessasary, and wasteful. Good to know that I am not the only one with that sentiment! Hmm, me to. I'm using a 'g %s' keyword ATM, but it would be nice. They should make a seperate Moz for embedding/web dev/and mail browsing is already seperate. Then they need an installer that can do all of them, with option like standard (thunderbird/firedbird/embedded/web dev/business (with mozCalc) etc. I just downloaded it and installed in on my XP SP1 box. It installed fine and created a profile but after launching nothing happens. No process even shows up. Maybe its a nightly bug, but like I said after launching nothing happens. Weird. Yes, there was a problem with a chrome package not getting registered. I've fixed this now and Monday's installers should now work for everyone. There may be other problems I don't yet know about. Please file bugs in the new "Installer" component in the Firebird Product in Bugzilla. works for me I read somewhere that the official installer for Firebird which was in the works was going to be built on the XPT cross-platform GUI but this is obviously a windows-only installer. What's the deal? And what are the plans for the future? Will other OS's get an official installer? #15 Re: I thought the installer was going to be x-platby dave532 Saturday November 8th, 2003 2:30 AM It's the same as the installers for the app suite. Each platform will have their own native installer, I think the Linux installer is planned next. It'd be difficult to make an installer that was built with XPToolkit because the installer would only work if Mozilla was already installed! Does the installer add info to the registry so that programs such as macromedia flash/shockwave installers will recognize that Mozilla Firebird is an installed browser? After entering a search term in the Google toolbar, pressing Enter does not start a search in this build of Mozilla Firebird. :-( I am migrating to TB. I am very happy with the program, but I am unable to display remote images in messages in the preview pain. In the options section there is a check box to block these images, but it is not checked. I have checked and unchecked this box and see no differences. I have searched the form, but do not see any mention of this issue. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated. Thanks |