MozillaFirebird

[Collins Richey]

I have nothing against Opera, Konqueror, Galeon, etc.;  I've tried them
all.  For now I've settled on MozillaFirebird as my browser of choice,
for a number of reasons:

1) It's GPL, of course.

2) It's part of the Mozilla roadmap.  After a few months of development,
MozillaFirebird (browser only) will become the Mozilla browser.  The
mailer component has been split out as Mozilla Thunderbird (already
usable, but alpha quality).

3) If you stick to the binaries or build from source using GCC 2.95.x
and older libraries, all (at least all that I've tried) the Mozilla
plugins still work.  It will be some time before all the plugins have
been built with the current GCC compiler.

Here's a brief HOWTO:

1) Go to
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/release-notes.html#install and
get the 0.6 release or google for the location of the "almost" nightly
CVS builds.

2) Unpack the source (tar xvzf thebuildtarball) under your favorite
directory (/opt is a good choice).  This will give you
/opt/MozillaFirebird.

3) Add the following script to /usr/local/bin or some suitable directory
and make it executable (chmod 755 mozfb).  I forget where I ripped off
the original script.  I've named mine 'mozfb'.

#!/bin/sh

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/opt/MozillaFirebird"
MOZILLA_PATH="/opt/MozillaFirebird"

# Seems like pidof resides in /sbin on some boxes
# Modifying the PATH to reflect that
PATH="/sbin:${PATH}"

if [ -z "`pidof MozillaFirebird-bin`" ]; then
        # No MozillaFirebird running
        ${MOZILLA_PATH}/MozillaFirebird $@
else
        # MozillaFirebird running - open a new tab/window
        ${MOZILLA_PATH}/MozillaFirebird -remote "openURL($@ ,new-tab)"
	# or if you prefer use "...,new-window)"
fi

4) Update your mailer preferences (ex. Sylpheed -> Other - > "mozfb %s")
and/or your window manager menus to invoke 'mozfb'.

5) Copy your mozilla plugins or create symlinks under
/opt/MozillaFirebird/plugins.  You can do this while the browser is
running.  My directory looks like this:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          856 May 17 20:17 flashplayer.xpt
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           62 May 17 20:18
javaplugin_oji.so ->
/opt/blackdown-jre-1.4.1/plugin/i386/mozilla/javaplugin_oji.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      1464736 May 17 20:18
libflashplayer.so-rwxrwxr-x    1 8482     8482        19856 May 16 17:45
libnullplugin.so 
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           44 May 17 20:20
mplayerplug-in.so ->/usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins/mplayerplug-in.so 
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root    root           42 May 17 20:22 nppdf.so ->
/opt/Acrobat5/Browsers/intellinux/nppdf.so 
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           32 May 17 20:20 plugger.so ->
/opt/netscape/plugins/plugger.so lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          
24 May 17 20:21 rpnp.so ->/opt/RealPlayer8/rpnp.so

6) MozillaFirebird "seems" to use the ~/.phoenix directory.  I couldn't
get the procedure warning about creating a new profile to work ("seems"
to be a Windows procedure), and my existing Phoenix setup works without
a hitch, but I'm prepared to preserve my bookmarks and to trash the
~/.phoenix directory, if problems arise.

Enjoy.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
gentoo stable - ext3