I’ve downloaded Mozilla Firebird 0.7 Release Candidate, and I must say, I’m impressed. While I run nightlies on my linux machine at home, here at work I normally use .61. The differences even between my nightlies and this .7 RC are pretty noticeable.

For one thing, they have greatly cleaned up the preferences dialogs. The privacy tab is shown below; it looks excellent! Gone is that dreadful “XXXBen” message found in previous builds, although a new temporary message exists under the advanced section.

0.7 now includes a built-in style-sheet switcher, which has very nicely been placed in the lower left corner of the browser. Browsing to Asa Dotzler’s Weblog shows off this nifty feature, which is implemented excellently.

Other enhancements include bundling the popular AutoScroll extension, which is turned on by default. AutoScroll emulates the middle-click-to-scroll functionality found in Microsoft IE and Office.

The advanced tab in the preferences showed up several nightlies ago, and let’s you control a few things which previously required an extension or a visit to about:config. Of note is the option to keep the tabbar always open (available in about:config as browser.tabs.autoHide), and toggling automatic image resizing (in about:config as browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing)

Speaking of about:config, the filter functionality now works properly as well! Entries are filtered dynamically as you type, a feature that never properly worked for me in the .6 releases. It’s a nice piece of XUL hackery, and it really helps control that huge list of prefs.

The last (but certainly not least) thing to mention here is the overall performance improvements. This is one thing I noticed immediately is that 0.7 seems to be much better about RAM usage. Right now, I’m writing this entry the 2nd of 3 open tabs. As you can see in the shot below, Firebird’s RAM usage is far below the expected 19 or 20 megs. It’s below 11 megs right now, which is how much IEXPLORE.EXE is taking up to display the same page I have open in Firebird’s first tab! Impressive. Of course, since IE is loaded with the system, it’s more difficult to get a true representation of how much RAM it’s actually using, but Firebird is definitely holding it’s own. Even staying below 17 megs is very good, and really shows how far Firebird has come in a split from the Seamonkey Mozilla releases, which would often gobble up 25-35 megs of RAM on this same system with only one or two tabs open.

With these kinds of improvements, Firebird is going to go far. Things I still want to see improved though are the default throbber and application icon; the Firebird flame icon, while it looks cool in the about dialog, looks pretty bad on the Windows taskbar; it just doesn’t scale well. Also, the throbber for the default theme (which is really the Qute theme) looks too much like a Quake icon, and I think should be changed.

Overall, I think 0.7 will be a really good release, and I’m looking forward to it. Go Firebird, Go!