I didn't have to wait that long for the compilation to finish at all. It took maybe an hour and installation went relatively smoothly even. After copying the bookmarks over from my parallel Mozilla installation, I feel quite at home. Java works (which means that basically all the plug-ins that used to work with Mozilla now also work with Firebird) and the thing is very lean and quick.
A major annoyance of Mozilla has been fixed: I used to get lots of Page contains no data pop-ups since I have a few entries in /etc/hosts that de-route requests to banner servers to 127.0.0.1 (and I don't have a webserver running). This pissed me off so much that I eventually wrote a little program that is got by inetd on incoming requests in order to serve a little bit of meaningless data so the pop-up disappears. But I don't need this thing for Firebird any longer as it seems.
Now I am quite curious to see whether I eventually manage to install a Flash plugin. Not that I would approve of it, but more and more pages serve essential information through these plugins.
