You may have heard me rave on about Crazy Browser which I gave a review of here. It was the absolute cream of the cop of internet browsers in my opinion. Notice the word was.

I now stand in awe of the awesome new king browser, Mozilla Firebird. It does everything Crazy Browser does, and more, and this is only version .7. Technically what they call a "technology preview".

It has all the wonderful benefits of tabbed browsing, and popup killing, plus has a ton more customization options and tweakability should you want it. First off, I actually managed to streamline my toolbar even more than Crazy Browser, getting it down to a sleek single row thus giving me more browsing space. That single row has all my menus, buttons, address bar and a built in Google search bar! It's also highly customizable through the use of "extensions". There's a ton of them available, and they allow to add only features you want without bloating the program with stuff you don't want.

Some of the features that really stood out to me were the find feature and the key word feature. The find feature replaces the normal "find box" you would have to bring up when looking for certain text on a page. Instead you now simply press / and start typing and it will jump to and highlight the text you're typing if found on the page. If you instead initiate a find with the ' then it does the same thing but only with links. The key word feature allows certain key word shortcuts to be used in the address bar. For example, if you type "dict lemur" in the address bar, you find yourself automatically taken to dictionary.com with a definition of "lemur" on your screen. Another cool and convenient feature to me is the ability to simply type a single word in the address bar, and it will automatically resolve the address intelligently. If I type "heathallyn"and press enter it goes to www.heathallyn.com, if I type "mozilla" it goes to www.mozilla.org. One thing it holds over Crazy Browser is the ability to rearrange your bookmarks any way you want, while Crazy Browser insists that they all be alphabetical.

Now for the "downsides" if you an really call them that (which I wouldn't really). Since it is still a "Technology Preview" it's in a slightly rough form. There is no "official" installer program so normally you would just download it , unzip the folder and run it, but there are some "unofficial" installers such as this one which will install it in the more familiar and traditional sense. Also to get the full customizability of various tab options (which I highly recommend) you need to down load this extension. After downloading that I quickly had all the functionality I liked with Crazy Browser, plus a lot of cool new features too. The only quirk I found was some Movable Type buttons which wouldn't show up, but a little research showed that to be the fault of the Movable Type code being IE biased, and I quickly found a fix for it. Also keep in mind that you will most likely need to download and reinstall any plugins you might need like flash or shockwave, since they won't have been installed on a new browser, but that's a very minor thing that didn't even take enough time or effort to phase me, and I'm damn lazy. One more con, I can't use my beloved IESpell spellchecker with it. I'll have to see if there's a Mozilla equivalent.

Now a little explanation to clarify a few things. Mozilla 1.5 is now out, and is a suite of programs including browser, mail, chat, news, etc. Mozilla Firebird is a stand alone browser, and Mozilla Thunderbird is a stand alone mail client. Strangely Mozilla does not have all the features of Firebird since the Firebird code is newer. I would hope that all the cool features of the stand alone programs will eventually be worked into the full all in one suite since they are, for me, the features that have made Firebird my new default browser. I am going to check out the mail client too, mostly because I'm excited at the fact that it has a built in baysean spam filter which intelligently learns to tell junk from mail and gets more and more accurate over time. I currently use Popfile to provide the same filtering for Outlook Express, though I like the idea of it being built in. The only downside with the mail client, to me, is the inability to check and sync with Hotmail, which naturally only Microsoft products can do since Hotmail is owned by MS. Not a big deal, but I like to keep my address book synced up with Hotmail so I have a backup of it in case of emergencies that's also available to me via the web. However if Thunderbird is anywhere neat as good as Firebird, I may switch mail clients too.

Mozilla has obviously been doing their homework, and the fact that it's all free and open source is very large bonus. I will be doing my part to spread the word and see if we can't help Mozilla take a bite out of IE's majority market share. I never thought anything could take me away from Crazy Browser. Technology always marches on, I suppose! Download Mozilla Firebird now, and you will never be able to go back to another browser.

Check my Links section for a consolodated list of all the links listed here and links to extensions which I use.