The first “official” builds of Mozilla Firebird for Mac OS X have appeared on Mozilla.org’s site. I’m taking down my experimental build because it’s no longer necessary. Mac Firebird needs some love to come up to the level of quality that we expect from a Mozilla product. So I encourage you to download an official build and file bugs in Bugzilla. In answer to some folks questions, yes I will eventually rewrite the the Pinstripe theme to work on the Mozilla app suite and Mozilla Firebird.

You might notice that scrolling with the mouse wheel or space bar is a bit more jerky than you are used to in Mozilla Firebird. This is because of a feature called Smoothscroll which seems to have problems on OS X. To turn it off, type ‘about: config’ in your URL bar, scroll down to ‘general.smoothScroll’, double-click it and set the value to false.

Aren’t codenames fun? I was going to wait for Firebird 0.6 but since a few of you have asked for a new build, here it is. The much hated bookmarks bug has been fixed among other things. Check out the included README file for a little more info.

If you’re having trouble downloading the file, please look at the comments for a mirror of the file.

Mozilla.org has renamed the Phoenix browser to Firebird. I’m fine with the name. It could have been worse.

I made a one line code addition and built Phoenix with metal windows. Check here for a screenshot. The bad news is that the metal windows flicker like hell when the contents are updated or resized. Also some of the chrome elements tend to vanish and reappear. Pretty, but totally unusable.