Mozilla Firebird and Xft2

Introduction

Mozilla Firebird is a small, lightweight browser based on the Gecko rendering engine that is used in the multi-platform, versatile Mozilla web browser. Mozilla Firebird is aimed at the desktop user who does not need many of the complex features or the bloat that unfortunately comes with using Mozilla. Of course, you might notice that the none of the latest Mozilla Firebird releases ship using Xft, which renders fonts with anti-aliasing quite nicely. The reason of doing this is for widesparead compatibility, but for those of you that have Xft and can use it, why waste it? Here you can find Mozilla Firebird binary Debian packages compiled with xft2.

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• Debian packages only now. Using the distbin builds is now deprecated. (In fact, they're gone.) Only Debian packages are being released from now on, signed with my PGP key.

• Dependency hell? You may get broken packages installing this deb if you don't run a mostly recent `unstable' system. If you have libgtk2.0-0, libxft2, libfontconfig1 (and all their related dependencies) you should be able to dpkg -i --force-depends the package without many problems. I won't support this though.

• Java works again! Download the latest release and download Blackdown Java 1.4.1_01 for gcc-3.2!!

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• If you use a RPM-based distribution like Mandrake or Red Hat, you would have an easier time grabbing RPM packages, like, here :) - however they are slightly out of date, but I suppose the ease of installation far supersedes this slight inconvenience.

• So far, I have built this for the i386 architecture only. If you want to build for a different arch, contact me...

• This package was built using gcc-3.3, which links against glibc 2.3. If you're running Debian Woody, you will need to either upgrade glibc (fairly stupid if you ask me, it's a huge can of worms) or upgrade completely to the testing or unstable distribution - which is not as unadvisable as you'd think, but it does come with its own little 'issues'. It still pretty much works though.

  You now have even less of an excuse to use unstable, because it represents what will be in the upcoming very close release of Debian Sarge!

• Mozilla Firebird is not perfect. There are still a handful of problems associated with using Xft to render your text, the most notable of which can cause lots of crashes! We recommend you keep an official nightly in your home dir in case you need to view a crash page. If you find one of these pages, please add it to the comments to the Bugzilla bug associated with it (or create a new one) and provide any debugging information you can.

• Quick hints Try running 'fc-cache' if certain fonts are crashing your browser. If you keep seeing un-antialiased fonts, remove the X11 font path from /etc/fonts.conf.

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These two shots (click to enlarge) are taken from 0.5 releases of Mozilla Firebird, without and with Xft. The site used was www.kuro5hin.org on Linux with Window Maker 0.80.1.

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All files can be found at http://pryan.org/firebird/joshk/dist.

Tips

If you want to interface with Mozilla Firebird from other programs, I recommend the program gnome-moz-remote, which spawns a new Mozilla Firebird process if there's not already one, or else it will us MozillaFirdbird -remote to manipulate the existing one. In Debian it is part of the gnome-bin pacakage.

Alternatively, you can use this launch phoenix script by Mohammed Sameer, but it doesn't work for me all the time, and not at all on FreeBSD. It also has the 'wrong' name ;). It works in much the same way as gnome-moz-remote, though.

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Last updated by Joshua Kwan on 10/19/2003