while some people of a certain age may have reservations about the new name given a clint eastwood movie of the same name, the fine folks at mozilla have released the successor to firebird – firefox. a word to the wise, if you’re on os x. export your bookmarks from your existing firebird/phoenix/whatever profile and delete the profile directory. i followed the install instructions and disabled extensions and firefox appeared to start-up fine, but icons were missing in the nav bar, tabbed browsing didn’t work, the scroll bars didn’t appear on long pages etc etc. amusingly, it took me awhile to track down my bookmarks because it never occured to me that they would be in an old “phoenix” profile. after i backed-up the bookmarks and deleted the old profile everything is a-o-k. better than just o.k. actually. firefox is noticeably peppier than its predecessor in terms of start-up, windowing and page rendering. oh yeah – and if you delete your existing profile os x will default back to thinking that safari is your default browser, so then you have to remember that you have to change your default browser preference from within safari’s preference instead of a “control panel” preference where it should be. nice

i just noticed that thunderbird 0.5 is also available. i guess i’ve got one more new thing to play with.