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by Cheah Chu Yeow.
Original Post: Firebird is now Firefox, milestone 0.8 released
Feed Title: redemption in a blog
Feed URL: http://blog.codefront.net/xml/rss20/feed.xml
Feed Description: ramblings of a misfit - web development, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, CSS, programming
It's been posted all over by now, even Slashdotted (mozilla.org was down for quite awhile earlier), Neowin-ed, blogged a thousand times over. Yes, Mozilla Firebird is now known as Mozilla Firefox. With the 0.8 Milestone release of the lightweight Gecko-based browser formerly known as Phoenix (now also formerly known as Mozilla Firebird), the Mozilla Foundation has come up with a name which shouldn't run into any legal tussles like the old Phoenix and Firebird names seemed to attract (well, the Firebird name wasn't exactly a legal tussle, more like an act of brotherhood among fellow Open Source developers).
Ben Goodger (Firefox Engineering Lead) wrote about the rebranding of Firebird to Firefox. Steven Garrity was drafted in as the new Visual Design Coordinator who developed the new Firefox icon you see below (together with the rest his team). Jon Hicks implemented it (meaning he did the computer graphic design work), as he describes in his journal entry. Yes links galore and more to come.
The rebranding also entailed some new spiffy icons, decals and ads which you can find in the Mozilla Firefox ad webpage. If you had a Firebird button or ad, it's time to update them! For my case, I had an 80 x 15 pixel Firebird blog button, but the new Firefox one is 94 x 15 pixel large, which was totally out of whack with the rest of the buttons. Photoshop to the rescue...
So what's new in Firefox 0.8? I won't repeat what's already been written, so you can refer to the Firefox What's New section and Jesse Ruderman's listing of new features and bugfixes. In particular, one nasty regression that wasn't fixed was the "Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions" regression. Hell, one of the biggest flaws of Firebird was it's poor extension management. Extensions often break a Firebird installation, like Tab Browser Extensions (Firefox 0.8 doesn't seem to work with TBE, so I got this patched TBE extension which you can get as well). And removing extensions has to be done manually (and tediously). Thankfully this will be addressed in Firefox 0.9 where an extension uninstaller is planned.
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