Building A Better Browser

Building A Better Browser

Arik Hesseldahl
Forbes

February 04, 2004

Remember the browser wars?

Just as the World Wide Web started to get interesting, software giant Microsoft got into the game to challenge Netscape Communications. Netscape's Navigator, you'll recall, was the dominant browser software--and made Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen rich--until most of the world gave in and just started using Microsoft's Internet Explorer by default. What's left of Netscape, the company, was acquired by America Online is now part of Time-Warner. It still puts out a browser software, and still runs an Internet service called Netscape Network.

But the best bit of the Netscape legacy? The original browser has been rolled into an open-source browser software project called Mozilla. The current release of the Mozilla browser is version 1.6, and it's an interesting product. But Mozilla's next-generation browser, known as Firebird, is looking to be far more intriguing.

We've been using Firebird on both Windows XP and Apple Computer's Mac OS X for a couple of weeks now. The more we use it, the more we like it, and the less we feel the need to launch Explorer. Aside from Windows and the Mac, it's also available for Red Hat Linux 7.0 and higher as well as Sun Microsystems' Solaris and IBM's OS/2.

Within minutes, it becomes clear that Firebird is a breath of fresh air compared to Explorer. If you're fond of keeping many browser windows open at once, then you'll like the tabbed browsing feature native to Firebird which lets you open a new browser window on a "tab" in order to switch back and forth from one site to another, without searching through several layers. It's easy, for example, to keep one window open to a Web mail account, another open to a news site and still two more open for perusing other sites. It's also easy to open bookmarks--what Microsoft calls "favorites"--in a new tab with a single right-click of the mouse.

Tabbed browsing isn't a new feature by any stretch--Netscape Navigator and Apple's Safari are but two that currently support it--but if you've never used it before, you'll grow to like it right away.

But the feature you're probably going to like best is that Firebird blocks unwelcome pop-up advertisements, without requiring that you download any additional software. And if for some reason there are sites whose pop-ups you want to see, you can easily build a list of them, and they'll work.

Finally, there's a great feature that users of Apple's Safari are already familiar with: a search field positioned in the upper right-hand corner of the browser. On Safari the default search goes directly to Google.com. On Firebird, there are a series of add-on engines available for easy download that also use that same space in the upper-right corner. Among the offerings are engines where you can search for books on Amazon.com, Web sites on Yahoo!, or track a shipment with UPS all without taking the time or effort to visit their respective Web sites directly. It saves a lot of time; the engines are a snap to install, and work right away.

Firebird is available for a free download from Mozilla and is currently at version 0.7, which means it has not quite reached the point of being a fully stable product. Eventually Firebird will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won't happen before it reaches version 1.5. But it's certainly worth a try if you're finding Explorer getting old. If, in its unfinished state, Firebird is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried.