I’d been rolling along using Mozilla 1.4 for the past few months until Seth Dillingham posted about how a new Conversant feature was supported in IE, Mozilla 1.4 and Mozilla Firebird. I’d never heard of Firebird (formerly Phoenix) until Seth posted it, but figured I’d download it and give it a whirl.
As Neo might say, “Whoa!” Firebird hasn’t yet reached a 1.0 release and not only does it have all the goodness that is baked into Mozilla, but this is by far the most stable browser I have ever used. My mean time between crashing with Mozilla and IE was probably about 4 hours. I ran Firebird for two weeks before experiencing my first browser crash.
The only defect I can find is that, like Mozilla, it has a nasty habit of crashing when printing certain pages. Mozilla used to crash on me several times a week while printing. With Firebird that’s been reduced to about once every other week, but it’s still an incredibly annoying bug.
Still, it’s got tabs, its got the incredible keyword system for bookmarks and sets of tabs . . . why people would still run IE is beyond me.