Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Jumps on 'Lean Browser' Bandwagon
fader writes "Following in the footsteps of fast (and often fantastic) wrappers around Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine), Mozilla has just released their own lightweight browser, Phoenix. Only Phoenix will still use XUL, the cross-platform markup language used for the current Mozilla interface. Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?"
My main gripe is that it doesn't look or act like my other Windows applications. The buttons are different sizes, the keyboard shortcuts aren't the same, and a lot of other things I don't want to think about. If they can skin/change Mozilla's behavior to act just like IE, they'll have a lot of converts.
It seems this build is only targeted to x86 (both Windows and Linux). Does any one know if there are plans to expand the compatibilty to other platforms? I mean we have Chimera 0.5.0 for OS X now, but the more compatible browsers the better.
If you allow Mozilla to load itself into memory for faster startup times (only fair considering IE does it without asking) you'll find that you can get a page loaded faster with mozilla.
I tried it using both browsers on the same site with my machine at work. The difference was on the order of seconds...
IE is junk compared to mozilla. Also, the Orbit theme rocks! Take a look here.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
What road/highway is this and what are the towns for each "milstone" along it?
How is an 8 MB install file light weight or lean? Opera is only 3.4 megs! Load times are still slow, but not nearly as bad as regular slowzilla. DEFINITELY a step in the right direction, this is one project to keep your eye on.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
If not, then wouldn't that be a good idea to cut down on the slowness? The issue with XUL as far as its benefits go are great. However, I don't think you need to interpret every time it starts. It should only check for changes. As far as rendering goes, I have noticed that the rendering seems to do too much at once. Perhaps if it took a more prioritized approach and rendered the underlying layout first, then text then media (for example) as well as allowed for the user or site author to prioritize more specifically then this slowness could at least be tolerated. an example of this would be a instructional site with graphical examples interspersed within the text. Personally I would like to see the text first. In fact, what if the site author used CSS (or XSL) stylesheets and had some for lower bandwidth or lower processing computers like handhelds. I sure would like the ability to set my browser preferences to (per site) use the text only (or low res pic I suppose) version of the stylesheet while still downloading the other crap in the background. Perhaps I could even set a preference to have it ask me when it was done pulling to re-render with the new stuff (instead of shaking the screen aroudn everytime a new pic is brought up causing me to feel like someone in an earthquake.
I am impressed with the features that Mozilla offers (and hope people start exposing more features that the reference mozilla browser did not).
I have had problems (bugs) that were fixed by disabling the loading into memory quick start feature. The sad thing is that I really would like to put that feature back, but can't until the bug is fixed. I agree that it is muuuuuuch faster however.
Slow at what?
I agree that under Linux mozilla takes forever to come up.
Under OS X its worse.
But under Windows, if allowed to load itself into memory pre-launch (which IE does. Only fair to let Mozilla do it as well) it is as fast or faster than IE.
But as far as rendering, mozilla on my computers tends to be quicker than other browsers I've tried. Under OS X, mozilla (once its loaded
-brain
I just downloaded and installed it. It offers 2 things that I always wanted (without hassling to get it). Small icons and fullscreen browsing. This IMHO is worth the approx 10meg download. Very nice -- I think xp (cross-platform) should mean equal access to features too.
Only a few minutes ago, I was looking at my IE browser at work, thinking 'If only I could have something like Galeon on Windoze'. Then up pops Pheonix. Wow! I probably won't install the 0.1 release, but hopefully we won't have to wait years for 1.0 to arrive. I'm replacing IE with Mozilla right now.
HH
--
I don't so much see mozilla as slow, as other browsers faster. when I use windoze =D I use IE, because like many mac things, it just plain works, and when I use linux, I try and use galeon, but the 1.1 mozilla was pretty spiffy too! long live choices and free will!!!
HELP!
is for my gtk theme to take over the Mozilla theme. Widgets and whatnot, not just color. I don't mind having buttons and layout set by moz, but I'd like an integrated feel, like it's part of the system... esp since it's the app I use most. I won't use galeon, mainly because it doesn't have some of the bells and whistles that mozilla does(that I do use).
Maybe he's on his lunch break. Or maybe that "more interesting" project is compiling, and he's reading Slashdot as it compiles. Maybe he has mental block, and is reading Slashdot to let his brain relax (Careful, don't read for too long, or permanent damage may occure).
Really, people like yourself really fuck me off. You jump on someone as soon as they complain, with a corus of "Why don't you fix it?" and "Fix it yourself!", as though everyone else in the world has a whole bunch of spare time to examine, understand and fix the code for your little pet project. Yeah, thats the one.
Get of your god damn high horse. When was the last time you did something that directly benefited the Open Source community? I mean, apart from imparting your insightful wisdows like "So why are you griping about this, instead of doing something else more interesting?" Why arn't you doing something more interesting?
It feels... smoother than Mozilla, loads pages a bit faster (or at least doesn't hang for nearly a second when switching between apps while the page is loading), and it uses fewer resources:
:)
Currently Mozilla (1.1) is using 32,852 kb of RAM, while Phoenix (phoenix.exe) is using 25,188 kb. This without any additional tabs/windows open.
There's only the fact that many, many preferences are not accessible yet (although many are enabled by default), but that is to be expected from an 0.1 release.
I'll definitely be keeping my eyes on this project
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?
Will the next KDE/GNOME or whatever desktop finally be user-friendly enough as a MacOS, OS X or even (shudder) a Windows desktop ?
Without so much as even a beta to try, who knows until we get the product ?
Is this just YAGBB (Yet Another Gecko Based Browser) or will this be the start of a modularization of the Mozilla browser???
I am a happy user of Mozilla, but i dislike the monolithic approach of integrating browser, mailreader, newsreader, composer and you name it into one executable. What happened to the old and proven Unix approach of "Do only one thing, but do it well!"?
I hope Mozilla in the future will be split into a suite of components, that work well together and with a consistent interface.
It's probably better that way. I would rather have chimera using the native cocoa GUI than the cross-platform GUI. Instead of developer's spending time on a Mac OS X version of Phoenix I'd rather see them lend a hand to Chimera Essentially Chimera and Phoenix would be somewhat redundant projects, for Mac OS X that is. In the end the core is still the same, gecko.
--
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
and it rocks!!!
I just downloaded the app for Win and took it for a spin. Very stable. Very fast. Reminds me of early versions of Opera.
Go lizzard! Go! Kill the round blue 'e'!
there's no place like ~
The only thing I've found that Mozilla has that Galeon doesn't is a few focus bugs. What's missing?
How do I set the proxy settings? I can't get through my companys firewall....
Just get (or make) some page with *lots* of nested tables and sub-tables. Then try switching between some other page and that one and you'll see the delay before Mozilla draws the HTML, even on a powerful PC (1.2Ghz Duron).
Here's a screenshot of Phoenix (mirrored here), if you're interested (via Google).
In my experience (Given I have only been using Mozilla for about 2.5 years now.) Navigator installed alone is fast and stable, as soon as composer/mail/etc.. are tossed in Mozilla starts running slowly and crashing. This has become much better over time, and I have not bothered keeping a plain navigator install around since 1.0, but it is food for thought...
If I.E. does what you want, then why do you feel the need to switch?
Gone:
Still there:
Since my computer is fast enough and has enough memory to run Mozilla, I don't notice that Phoenix loads faster. An older computer with less memory would probably be a better test. Since my favorite privacy features are missing, I have no intention of switching, but if it runs faster on older computers I would recommend it for that. (Please try it on something slow and report.) It might also be appropriate for somebody who wants "just a browser" because of the lack of other applications. The lack of these applications seems to only save a couple megs of download, again I'll take the full featured Mozilla.
If you're behind a proxy, don't even bother downloading Phoenix. It doesn't have *any* proxy settings whatsoever.
Think I'll stick with Opera still.
Mack Trucks launches compact car division.
Microsoft creates a portable XBox system.
Ron Jeremy goes limp.
wh00p
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Anyone know how to make Phoenix share bookmarks with old Mozilla?
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
When will there be a FreeBSD port?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
I find that if you can really tell the difference in speed between Mozilla or any of its descendants, then you really just need to buy a newer and faster computer.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
It is awesome. I love it. Clean and simple. No install required, everything stored in the directory structure. Finally.
I can't seem to find the system requirements anywhere. Is this browser going to be more forgiving on older computers? I doubt it since it still uses XUL, but you never know...
I love everything open source, but yet I am the slashdot's troll's cliche since I use windows as my main OS, albeit a pirated version of XP. So, I figured I should at least switch to Moz. I made the commitment to try moz as my only browser for two weeks and to only use IE if I needed it.
.rar, .wmv, etc. and just have the file not downloaded, but opened in a new window or tab. I see where I can add such mime types, but this should be done already.
So far, Ive been very disapointed
First, I dont know what all this hubub about tabbed browsing and mouse gestures has been. W/o a quick way to cycle through my tabs, w/o being to have a tab be automagically reloaded, w/o a keyboard shortcut to close the tab, I dont see why opening multiple windows and using the WinXP group programs feature isn't any better.
Second, the auto-scroll Moz bug has been around forever. Every time Ive been on another computer and browsed in IE, I realiz how often I use that feature. It drives me crazy not having it in Moz.
Third, maybe I can w/ a theme, but I can not quickly move and re-arrange my bars like I can in IE. Luckily there is a google bar (kinda) for moz now, but since it has to sit stacked w/ the other bars and I can not combine, I don't use it.
Fourth is rendering. I know this is due to sites doing best viewed in IE, but when I need to read a bug report on microsoft.com, or a story is only at CNN.com, I need to be able to read it. Would it be so wrong to add in what is needed so IE pages render correctly? On top of that its very anoying when I go to some sites to be told I have to have such and such browser. Again, its the fault of the webmaster, but it screws me.
Numero cinco. Mime types. It is really anoying to click on links like
6. Form and password management. If more then one person used my computer, ever, I would think the password manager in Mozilla is great. However, I am the only user and its really anoying having to enter a password every time to save the time of entering a password. I also notice that some forms (ie the google search) do not auto fill, or show me what I have entered there in the past, even though I have that option turned on.
7. Mouse gestures were a joke. Every time I wanted to highlight something, and then copy it, the gestures decided I wanted to close Moz. I could have saved this with a modified key, but then what is the point of the gesture if I have to hit my keyboard?
8. Until I hunted it down, Moz would not let me use anything other then composer for mailto: links. This I was able to fix, but it was not cool.
9. This one seems to make no sense what-so-ever but I think is my last main complaint about Moz. Last night I wanted to download a patch from fileshack. So, I started the download in Moz and noticed I was only getting 50KB/s. Normally, I get somewhere around 300. So, I fired up explorer.exe, hit fileshack, and started another download at the same time, and downloaded it very quickly at a full 300KB/s. I tried this with different sites and different downloads (inc http and ftp), and each time Moz was comming up as one slow download.
10. One last thing that relates to this article is speed. After I have moz open and have gone through a few tabs and few windows, I check mem usage and Moz is using over 40megs and is running 20-30% cpu usage. IE never did that.
So, I dont think this is the FINAL gripe about Moz, at least not from me. Ill finish out my two weeks, but I can't wait to get back to IE. I am just as anxious to try Moz again after the next big release.
PS - A cookie import would have been a good feature too.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Use Dillo:
Dillo
It's not perfect, but it is extremely fast, and very useful. It even got a mention on Linux Today:
Linux today article on Dillo.
Since the growing Sony PS2 Linuxkit Community is still in bad need of a decent browser running on the slow but cool box i will give this one a try as soon as i return from the munich oktoberfest later that day. Maybe someone more sober could give it a try on the PS2 as well?
;-(
The Windowsversion (that i could try here at work) looks great and renders our intranet pretty well. It still lacks Proxysupport so i cant comment on any other pages yet
cu,
Lispy
there are a few simple things that would make it feel so much faster....
1) Cache a picture of a blank page instead of mucking about drawing everything from first principles every time. Show this (or whichever part the user has chosen to start up with) FIRST before doing anything else. It doesn't matter if the thing isn't clickable yet, there is plenty of time to get to that stage while the user is moving the mouse. Buffen any clicks the user manages to make before you are ready and they will never notice.
2) Accept and buffer keyboard input while pages are drawing. I get so annoyed that I can't fetch one page and then get a new browser window to open - even Netscape 4 let me do this!
3) Cache the way the mail window looks and restore to that when it's opened (see point 1)
Things like this would give an impression of improved speed with practically no change in the actual code. Hell, you could even take the startup pic away earlier in the loading process and it would make the thing feel faster!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I downloaded Phoenix a few minutes ago. The speed improvements are flooring. There are a few quirky things with text input, as I see now that I am posting this comment. But for speedy web surfing, lynx might just have a new competitor.
jrbd
galeon = gnome = for communists
...on my win2k boxen. I've used mozilla on both my win2k and freebsd boxen off and on for the past couple of years. Until now, I'd never seen one that could launch or render pages as speedily as IE. It still seems a bit slower on javascript, but its static page rendering is insanely improved over the last I'd tried (Mozilla 1.0 pre-release) any Mozilla derivative.
My first complaint mirrors that of others on this phorum: its look and feel. OSS gui's are slowly starting to mod the included apps to a more unified look and feel... but in general, they are expectantly more eclectic looking/feeling than most commercial efforts. Now... windows may not be the work of art that OSX is, but in general you can expect a certain look & feel inside windows programs. Mozilla still, after the past couple years, cannot seem to get their windows binaries to actually look like a standard windows app. Very aggrevating. Especially since I have better things to do with my time than fetch the source and figure out how to change the look & hot-keys.
My second complaint is one that time will fix, almost certainly. Integration & 3rd party apps. Sure, you can get most of the features that IE has and Pheonix-Mozilla lacks by *upgrading* to Netscape... But Netscape is butt-ugly and slow as hell. Plus, I'm only going from one evil empire's browser to another evil empire's browser. Why would I want to do that, considering IE works wonderfully? So... in the mean time, Mozilla doesn't have anywhere near the list of apps that integrate with it. I like having the ability to add all those spiffy toolbar buttons! I like being able to right click and see a host of commands that I've added to my browser! Until these two issues are resolved... I'll stick with IE6 on my win2k boxen. It's fast, stable, and renders darn near everything.
On the other hand, my freebsd box is going to have a copy of Phenoix-Mozilla on it tonight. And that is a happy prospect. (Assuming the linux binary will run properly on freebsd.
/dev/random
My big complaint with Chimera is that it doesn't seem to have some features that are critical for web development - for example, no Javascript console, acts weird when loaded from fireworks, etc.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
you didn't read his post did you? if you let moz reside in memory *like* ie does then it is faster than ie and 1.0+ has never chrashed for me. I do remember those problems in 0.9, but they are gone.... so now you have no excuse.
Chimera is itself a redundant project. Mozilla 1.1 has Quartz rendered fonts and you can get the pinstripe theme which uses an API provided by Mozilla called nsTheme to draw the widgets. This API allows Pinstripe to draw the widgets and some backgrounds using the Mac's Appearance Manager . So the operating system draws most of the theme. I give Chimera a shot every now and again, but it is so feature thin as compared to the full blown Mozilla 1.1.
...is why they didn't do this three years ago, before their market share was in the basement? This could have held onto a reasonable share of the browser market, and would have boosted the credibility of the whole project immensely.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Mozilla permits fullscreen browsing. I'm running 1.1, and pressing F11 (under XP) does just that.
Mozilla is a great chunk of software. I don't think that another "browser" is required, in fact this will only help to dillute Mozilla's brandname.
Microsoft's stuff has been just great for along time. The Mozilla group should just focus on making their HTML rendering engine, Gecko, completely useable by as many application developers as possible... for example a wxWindows binding would be a great boon.
And what's this with changing the icons? Either it's a Dragon, Sea-Monkey, a big M, or a Square thingy that is hald blue and half read. I've got four icons on my page for the same thing...
In short... Mozilla needs some marketing oriented types instead of more nerds. For example, it needs help making Chatzilla work for people like my gf who can use AIM but get confused when chatzilla doesn't find a server and complains.
Other than startup, I certainly don't find it slow.
BUT, it takes up HUGE amounts of memory. It has no problem driving my 256M W2K box (work, not mine...) into swap, which is maddening.
But tabbed browsing, no pop-ups, etc, has won me over. I have (and must use for some stuff [ I hate activeX]) IE, but I find myself starting the lizard 90%+ of the time now. Its just that good.
I used to use IE as my browser of choice, it was there and I used it. However, a friend turned me on to Mozilla just over a month ago and so I downloaded the latest 1.1 and gave it a run on my celly 500 + 192 megs ram.
At first I was leery about running mozilla because I have heard that it would crash often. I think i had it crash twice since I had it installed and it was when i was turning features on and off. - It didn't crash out of the blue for me (yet) anyway. It's a hella more stable then my preconceptions gave it prior to installing.
The first thing that got me hooked was the tabbed browsing, it's the coolest thing i've seen in a long time (as far as broswer features are concerned). Also the popup control feature is very handy when you surf around alot.
I also like how the toolbars at the top are collapsable just by clicking the side tab thing. It doesn't REMOVE it, just minimizes it, and it's always there for you to turn back on easily. - I don't know if netscape had this already but it's pretty neat IMHO.
Gripes - I have no gripes really, But last night i was trying to load up an old aim logfile (if you remember, aim actually had logging as a feature at one point in time)...So i loaded this aim html logfile (12 MEGS OW!!) with mozilla and it liturally took for_ever to show it. Granted, it was a hefty logfile. So i fired up IE to view the logfile and it displayed it very quickly.
I'm not sure exactly why mozila was slower with this, my guess is that moz tries to load it all at once -before- it displays the html. IE on the other hand was very quick showing it to me, so i had a chance to read some of it while it was continuing to load in the background.
Otherwise I'm FULLY satisfied with Mozilla, and it has become my default broswer. I was no OSS fan to begin with, but if i can get hooked on a broswer, i'm sure there are other open source programs out there that can really grab my attention too!
- One happy convert.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I just tried it and the pages were loading so fast my keyboard caught on fire!
In response to number six
Edit -> Prefernces -> Privacy and Security -> Master Password -> Change Password
Enter your current password in the current password box, and none in the new box. You know no longer will get prompted for a password.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
I have a client with a resident "computer expert". The guy is so anti-MS that he'll install *anything* so long as it is not from MS. In this case, he started singing the praises of Mozilla.
Soon enough, I got calls from the client. It seems he had installed Mozilla on everyone's PC, and removed Netscape (4.7, the defacto default at this site). *Everyone* was bitching about how slow Mozilla was, and how they all wanted Netscape back.
Seems he was suddenly "unavailable" to fix this mess, so they called me in.
Long story short? Mozilla is gone (and a pig it is, slow and bloated) and Netscape 4.7 is back, and the problems are all gone.
I'm sure this new Mozilla-based browser is faster, it would be hard *not* to be. Thanks, but I'll stick with Opera.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I'm not a platform evangelist my any means; I use what works best for me.
:)
I want IE style shortcuts in Mozilla. I want my 5 button mouse to do the same things in Mozilla as they do in IE.
Why do I want platform similarity between Mozilla and IE? Why do I want the mouse buttons to work in the same way? For starters, IE has been so much better than any other browser for so long that I've forgotten all the clicks, and I'm not sure that Ctrl+Shift+L is fantastically better than Ctrl+O for the open location menu.
But, something has come along that is mostly better than IE for what I want to do, so I use it most of the time. I just want my key shortcuts to work the same, I want my 4th and 5th mouse buttons to work while browsing, and I want it not to crash hard and take out my OS in the process.
Get the talkback version and use it, please
It seems that we have failed to overlook the popup factor. Since I have gone to Mozilla, I have seen only ONE popup that I didnt want. That in itself is the primary reason that I will not go back to IE. Gone are the days where I felt afraid to click on a *cough*porn*cough* link.
Font rendering is far better in Phoenix, thought it was using the same rendering engine. If I open the same page with Mozilla/Galeon and Phoenix there is a major difference, Phoenix is actually doing it right. There is also one extra "feature", I can not start Mozilla when Phoenix is running, try it, /usr/bin/mozilla will only give you new Phoenix window.
Something important to note: on Windows XP, Phoenix renders web pages using Luna (Windows XP) native widgets, as opposed to drawing it's own. Check resource:///res/samples/test5.html in both Mozilla 1.2 and Phoenix to see the difference.
This instantly makes it more appealing to Internet Explorer users. Lets hope there is more coming. If Mozilla wasn't the IE killer we hoped, keep the features up (and the download size down). Oh, and if you're using the Luna UI now, please consider using the same techniques for native Windows widgets in the rest of the browser as well!
I switched to Mozilla for casual browsing a few months ago (gestures and tabs; I can't ever go back). But for web applications (phpMyAdmin, etc) I stuck with IE. Why? Because Mozilla is much, much slower than IE at rendering the huge nested tables and complex forms that such applications often use.
I just popped open Phoenix and pointed it at a phpMyAdmin instance. Ahhhhhh.... very smooth, running almost as quickly as IE. Beautiful.
Now if only someone could fold these rendering performance optimizations into Mozilla proper, so that I might have my themes, bookmarks, gestures, tabs, and mail reader back. I don't give a hoot about startup time as long as I've got the system tray nubbin, just give me that optimized renderer!
This is not a finished product by any means, although the /. story says it's "released." It's the FIRST release, version 0.1, missing many features; 0.2 is in development now. Also, there's no mac version yet.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Admittedly this is a bit offtopic from the Mozilla angle. In regards to fast browsing, I noticed after applying IE 6 SP1 on my XP box that general browsing was a LOT faster. More responsive, pages rendered quicker, download faster, etc. I'll have to download Phoenix tonight and see how it compares. Has anyone done any kind of tests to see how both browsers compared?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Really. Would you tell Linus to stop complaining if he mentioned that Mozilla felt a little slow? What if Alan Cox happens to note that XFree86 has a bug, will you tell them to fix it themselves? Will you bitch and moan that they shouldn't be complaining, because they're too lazy to fix it themselves?
What about you? Have you ever used a program and though, Well, this doesn't quite work as I would hope. Did you spend the next week reading the code and fixing it? Do you always do that? Or, did you complain? Did you just stop using the software? Of course you did. Go on, admit it, you didn't have the time, and you were working on something more interesting instead
Constructive criticism is just as valid as a patch. Your users are the best people to tell you when you've gotten it wrong. Listen to them. Don't get all high and mighty with them, telling them that they have no right to complain, or that they should fix it themselves.
Blah to you and your elitist attitude. Certainly, don't try to attach your attitude to Free Software at large. I've churned out plenty of Free Software, and your attitude is certainly not what Free software is all about.
Now shouldn't you be doing something more interesting?
Select File->Save Page As and select Text as type of file to save and the html is stripped from the file. Great for grabbing pages to view on your PDA!
OK... has anyone actually pulled this off? I can get it to recognize things like my mousewheel settings... but I can't get it to use my proxy. *grumble*
_sig_ is away
It's nice that they're adding new features to Moz, it's even kinda nice that they're making new versions of it. The problem is, it isn't finished yet.
Until Mozilla gets its updates in the form of patches, it'll never be accepted outside the IT community. You simply can't tell the average user that the only way to upgrade a product is to completely erase their old installation and download a new 50 meg version.
We patched a security hole, erase and reinstall.
We added 10K of new features, DL the entire thing all over again.
Ignore for the moment the hassle involved even for someone who knows what they're doing. The avergae user won't even attempt this because they'd be afraid of losing all their email, bookmarks, etc. The FAQ even states that you have to recreate your account with each new version.
Forget playing around with brand new browsers. The old one won't become widespread until people can patch it with the same ease as any other program.
In somewhat related news, Opera released a new beta version of their browser last night, Norwegian time. It has many new features, including improved anti-alias and Java handling. The "hidden" distribution place is here. Incidentally, native FreeBSD builds are provided for the first time.
This all started with Apple's QT 4 player, which completely broke the highly regarded Apple Human Interface Guidelines and was put onto the Interface Hall of Shame just for that. Then Winamp came out, creating one of the first in-app skinnable applications, which is cool, but led everyone to release skinnable apps, such as Windows Media Player, and a lot of similar ones on the *NIX side. Sure, it's a media player, you don't interact with it like a word processor or the like, but there's something to be said about interface consistancy when teaching computers to newbies. That's why it's odd that Apple broke that mold with QT4, as they lived and died by the HIG in their efforts to promote the Mac system.
Now with MOz's interface scheme, as with a lot of other cross-platform libraries like Java, QT, etc, it doesn't tie into the OS control toolkit and instead relies on drawing it's own widgets. To do the former would have to break cross-platform ability (I've yet to see a fully cross-platform system that uses the system's native toolkit, mostly due to lack of certain features in some kits compared with others. Even those that try to do this typically have to hard code certain settings that the user would normally be able to change -- I have a friend (hi paul!) that typically likes light text on black, and it's amazing how many Windows-native programs alone don't use the system colors, or use them inconsistantly as to make programs unusable.) It's understandable that WORA is a lofty goal, but there should be more push to try to provide some system native level that can be easily built without too much problem. For example, Nethack is a good example where out of the entire source tree, only a few special files are needed for supporting a different interface, including text and graphic variations; someone even pasted a Diablo-like orthorhomic few on top of the Nethack code, by only adding the appropriate hooks for that GUI. I'd rather see more effort here with Moz and other programs to provide this, though with much effort, than to keep on reinventing customization wheels that are inconsistant with the OS's customization.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Makes it useless at work.
In fact, the entire "advanced" section of preferences is not present.
Maybe next version?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
What is the point of developing another nerdy XUL based Mozilla browser? Have the lessons of the Mozilla project not yet been understood? Some of the biggest weaknesses of the Mozilla browser can be attributed back to XUL. XUL enables cross platform applications to be quickly built, but for this developer convenience the biggest trade off for your end users is that your application will never fully conform to the native user interface of the operating system it is run on. A secondary concern is the memory and processor cost of the XUL layer - no one wants a fat and slow browser, caused by having to compile and run a Java Script based user interface at runtime.
Why doesn't the Mozilla project develop fully native user interfaces around the Gecko HTML rendering engine instead of wasting precious time and development resources on another dead-end XUL based browser. A number of separate teams have already started such projects independently (Chimera, K-Meleon & Galeon). The Mozilla team need to refocus their efforts from developing half-caste XUL based browsers toward building native front-ends for each operating system that can complete head-on with the more popular commercial browsers. An XUL based application will just never cut it for the masses.
I downloaded this and ran it on my A22p, ~1Ghz and 512MB running RH 7.3 w/KDE.
The start-up time was at least twice as fast, but the memory foot print was just about the same as mozilla 0.9.9.
I checked the page load time on several sites and the difference was under my JND.
Remember when there was emacs-18 and lucid emacs? RMS couldn't co-exist with the Jamie and the Lucid folks and now we have xemacs and fsf emacs.
Present day: galeon has been around and is a well developed lightweight browser. The mozilla folks *had* to do their own rather than adopting something that is already out there and accepted.
I guess it is always good to have options, but it seems like such a waste of effort in this case...
Subject says it all. Does this reduce Mozilla's elephantine bulk? Top output, anyone?
Since when is more than 8 megabytes a "small" browser?
It works and is faster. Looks almost exactly as my current Mozilla. I like simplified interfaces and its nice to see one done for mozilla. Btw, dont confuse simplified with dumbed down wich is a whole other story.
HTTP/1.1 400
Chimera is not redundant. Galeon isn't redundant, either.
Pinstripe is about making Mozilla look better. Chimera is about looking exactly right, *behaving* right and not having the non-browser ballast. Don't let Swing fool you with "Pluggable Look And Feel". While look might to some extent be pluggable, feel including behavior usually isn't.
Chimera is the Right Thing for OS X.
Ever heard of company called "Netscape"? Mozilla isn't meant for end users. Quote:
(emphasis mine)_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Sure, we have Galeon and K-Meleon (and others), but if this is the direction that Mozilla is going to be taking, then I'm going to be hooked. I am an Opera user, and I think that the recent Mozilla builds are pretty nice, but they still lack the speed and refinement that I desire in the UI.
I'm testing it on a much older Windows machine at work, and I must say that I am very impressed with Phoenix's speed and responsiveness. At home, on my Slackware 8.1 box, I'll keep using Opera for now (i like the speed and antialising support with QT) until I upgrade to Slackware 9 with the newer Gnome2/GTK libraries. Then, I'll have to give Phoenix a spin on Linux.
I'm really impressed though. I hope that this eventually replaces the current Mozilla UI, after it becomes a stable release and gets mroe features.
I'm using Mozilla 1.1, have 6 tabs open, and it's only using 19,642K of RAM. What are YOU doing???
I haven't used it since 4, but the lack of up-to-date Javascript support in Opera was disappointing.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It's hard to think that here, now, in 1989 we'd have to download *8* WHOLE MEGS.
Unlike processors, memory, and storage, new dial-up networking technology does not become more powerful over time: A new 56K modem in the year 2003 is not significantly faster than a new 56K modem in the year 1997, back when x2 and K56Flex (competing 56K modulations) were fighting it out. There's a theoretical limit to how fast a modem can receive information over one line of the public switched telephone network. Downloading eight megabytes isn't going to get faster for Joe Sixpack any time soon.
Besides, Opera runs on PDAs that have limited RAM to keep the price, physical size, and battery drain down. The memory-hungry Gecko engine is going to have a lot harder time competing in the handheld arena.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm writing this in IE because after installing Phoenix my Mozilla become rather screwed - a lot of pictures for some reason don't show. Just wondering if anyone else has had this happen?
Btw, I'm no idiot - I didn't install Phoenix in the same directory as Mozilla, and I've checked all my preferences etc etc.
I also was unable to get Phoenix working with my proxy even though I copied and pasted the settings directly from Mozilla.
Does Phoenix have a smaller footprint than Mozilla? I only have 128MB, and Mozilla makes me spend loads of time swapping if I run anything else. Netscape, Opera, and Internet Exploiter don't do this. It's my last complaint about Mozilla.
Xesdeeni
In short... Mozilla needs some marketing oriented types instead of more nerds. For example, it needs help making Chatzilla work for people like my gf who can use AIM but get confused when chatzilla doesn't find a server and complains.
No, it doesn't. That's what Netscape is for--Mozilla for non-nerds, with branding and hand-holding and chat programs that are better than IRC.
If only I could have something like Galeon on Windoze
In addition to Phoenix, here's another app for Windows that's similar to Galeon.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since there are new security exploits appearing for IE almost every month/week/few hours, unless you cripple the browser by turning off all scripting/java/activeX controls etc, you're likely to end up with a virus or shitload of marketing crap all over your harddrive eventually.
I still use it, and have now added entries in my local DNS server to block out links to gator etc as I got sick of uninstalling their redirect garbage.
Besides which, MS is the beast, as we all know and using their browser just encourages them...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
.... particularly with enigmail, the integrated gpg plugin. It doesn't get virused, works on all my favorite platforms, can handle 8-10 mail/news accounts swimmingly, handles html mail better then LookOut, and fires off browser links in moz. And it looks GREAT in OS X.
All these 'lean and mean' moz-based browsers are neat, I suppose, but I continue to use, and like, mail/news..
Sorry, you are a bit lame. You can use the location bar as your google search tab. Just enter the search words, hit the search button or choos in the recent url list "Search Google for". Of course you have to make sure in your prefs, that google will be used for the location bar. See, there is absolutely no need for additional waste of space like in IE.
Actually, although I find the Google search from the address bar very useful, I still would like the full Google toolbar as in IE... It adds lots of other overlooked features which I use quite often. In order of my usage: search term highlighting in current page, parent folder (can be used to reach "home" page), google translation into English, and google's cache of page. Then there's the "Google search site" and Pagerank indicator, which I don't really care about. But still, Google toolbar is extremely useful to me, and I'm sure many other people as well.
Hmm... I think I'm going to disagree with you, here. Mozilla doesn't need centralized branding any more/less than Linux does.
Working on other people's computers, I find probably more than half of them have a version of IE "themed" to suit some ISP (such as AOL).
Oh, you didn't know you could do that? Well, you can, using IEAK, free download from Microsoft.
Microsoft won over Apple by allowing many vendors to provide its product to Apple's one. Mozilla (and all open source software) do the same thing to Microsoft, in software.
I find it endlessly funny that the very forces Microsoft used to win (support from multiple hardware vendors) are the very forces they now fear most. (OSS support from multiple software vendors)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Okey, lite of topic:
I've done a complete build of an mozilla optimized for athlons. you can get it here: mozilla-athlon-pc-linux-gnu-1.2a.tar.bz2
But: I used gcc-3.2 so if you don't have that, don't download it.
> Will it still be fast enough to
> overcome the final gripe about
> Mozilla, namely that it's just too
> slow?"
Well... but memory footprint is still a big problem, and that is the case even for the "slim" version like Galeon which does nothing more than browsing...
Mozilla still doesn't run in OpenBSD.
*Every* person I know that has used it hates it. They say it crashes and they end up reverting to an older Mozilla or using something else.
Mozilla uses a lot of memory, and leaks.
I still think Mozilla is a cool project though. But saying that it's the final gripe is ridiculous.
"Complex systems come from simple systems that work" I couldn't agree more and this goes along with the "do one thing, but do it well" approach. However, if I have a ton of craplets that do something well with 'well' meaning that there is no hope of every expanding or configuring that thing it does without breaking the very hacked together code, then I don't see that as an advantage. People that make these apps could do everyone, including them, a favor by designing it to be interface (human and component) independent. While to me it is not necessary for all my apps to run through a master app, what I would like is to be able to have seemless communication between the various apps and have a similar look and feel. Remember that Mozilla is just a REFERENCE implementation.
I'm having a heck of a time finding a lean browser to run on this thing. I haven't even attempted Mozilla. Galeon is too big, sending my poor machine deep into swap. I tried downloading Opera, but it kept complaining about not finding the right version of libXm.so, even with the statically-linked version.
I see lots of talk about how fast this Phoenix is, but I've yet to see *any* mention about its memory footprint. Is it really lean, or is it simply lean as compared to Mozilla?
I now have dillo running, and it looks promising. Any other suggestions?
(No, buying a new computer is not an option. I remember running browsers on my old 486, so this shouldn't be impossible!)
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
At least, under X, you can just 'paste' the URL anywhere in the main browser window with the middle mouse button and Mozilla will go there. So, when someone posts a URL that's not a link, all I need to do is highlight (left mouse button), and paste (middle mouse button). Very nice--I never touch the keyboard. I always miss that feature when I use Windows.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
The scripts need to be rewritten to work in another directory. Gentoo 1.3 compiles Mozilla 1.x into /usr/lib/mozilla, and that's where all the scripts want Phoenix to be. Naturally I can't just take the contents of Phoenix and throw it on top of Mozilla. Under Windows however, Phoenix will run out of its own directory -- alongside mozilla -- without any problems.
What irks me about galeon is the half-way integration. The app framework is nice, all gtk/gnome goodness, but in the gecko render window itself I get a mishmash of three widget styles. First there is the "mozilla native" widgets, which are unthemeable by any means, used for form buttons and the little arrow buttons on dropdown comboboxes. Then there is the gtk widget used for the actual dropdown list in a combobox (complete with gtk-themed scrollbar!). Finally, the scrollbars that border the render window and sub-frames are themed with the mozilla theme.
Unless you use the Raleigh gtk theme, the "classic" mozilla scrollbar won't match gtk. You could try theming gtk with a Mozilla Modern theme and setting gecko to use Modern so the scrollbars match, but that's a cop-out, and nothing will fix the "mozilla native" widgets in the HTML forms.
If you are like me and use the elegantly flat ThinIce gtk theme for your desktop, then galeon looks like the frankenstein monster it is, all bolted together from barely compatible parts. Call me when galeon looks as slick as Konqueror running the Liquid theme.
Thanks, I didn't even see that.
Like I said, I'm a n00b. But at least I'm trying! :-)
Thinking about it, it seems to me that the go button being on by default would make it easier for the n00bs like me who are fresh from IE.
Murphy was an optimist.
... is a reason I'll be sticking with Galeon. Such a well thought-out browser. Kudos to the developers.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Initial rendering speed is actually faster than IE, and with the preloader, it comes up just nearly as fast.
But woe be unto you if you try to scroll, resize or move that window around. My god! It's like one of those "mouse trails" cursors that leaves a half dozen copies of itself trailing behind it.
I realize XUL isn't going to compete with native widgets, but this is ridiculous. It's pretty much unusable except for single-screen static pages.
I'm still trying to see if the mail client can import my Outlook Express mailbox (my gut feeling is "no"), but having played with that a while, it reminds me of how much I hated Communicator's email client...
im posting from in phoenix now, seems fast so far.
Don't forget that linux runs on dozens of different architectures. Myself I am using Debian PPC on an iBook.
If I launch Mozilla the first time, it takes up to 25 seconds. If I quit and immediately re-load once the process has gone, it loads in about 5 seconds (with very little hard drive activity). My disk cache is currently 181MB, which even with the size of Mozilla is more than enough. Mozilla still loads more slowly than IE. The whole time it is loading, it has the CPU maxed out, unlike IE, so if my system is processing something else, there's a big time penalty for loading Mozilla.
How about those of us heretics like me who run Debian on PowerPC?
I just want the source. I can compile it myself. Isn't Mozilla supposed to be open-source? Why is no one even complaining that this is a binary-only release? Are we turning into binary-only critters ourselves?
And if so, how long will it be until the "alternative" OS/Browser/BellyButtonLint community will look just like the Windows community?
------------------------------------------- Just Say no to Windows!
Mozilla isn't slow. The performance is very much improved since the early versions. (Okay, I'm using an ADSL line, so that could make a difference) but I certainly don't think that Mozilla is slow compared to IE.
If you're talking start-up time, IE is faster because it's embedded in Windows. It gets started up when windows starts up.
Yuioup
The Mozilla group should just focus on making their HTML rendering engine, Gecko, completely useable by as many application developers as possible
http://www.codeguru.com/controls/iemozilla.html
In other words, you only need to replace the CLSID_WebBrowser with CLSID_MozillaBrowser.
Mozilla beats IE in caching No-cache pages. Many commercial sites use No-cache tag liberally. I've always hated the misuse of this tag, it wastes bandwidth and my time. With IE, No-cache pages are not cached at all, and when you use the back button, pages get reloaded. Mozilla is smarter, and seems to cache No-cache pages in the same window. I've verified this by looking at packets when surfing American Idol site, IE will send out about twice as many HTTP requests. Makes for much faster surfing with Mozilla when site is slow. Now if I only get around to writing bookmark sync for these too, I'll be able to move between the two seamlessly.
Not sure about speed yet--I've been using it for about 3 minutes--but the customizable toolbar is GREAT! FINALLY! I get my 'home' button up where it belongs, as well as a 'go' button. thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!! good work guys! yes, I'm excited! how could you tell?!?!?
:-)
!!!!!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Weak, they don't have proxy support built in. I guess when they mean lightweight, they mean it don't do shit but display web pages.
It's pretty cool though.
LoRider
quote from Terminator 2.
annoying redhead: so wheres your mom?
john connor: she's at pescadero, it's a mental institution okay.
...I got nothing.
Mabye if you knew more about the history, you'd be better educated.
WinAmp (1996), then QT4 (1999, iirc), then Media Player 7 (2001ish) is the timeline.
The problem with being cross-platform is that different platforms support different widgets. This is why QT and Moz will look like Win32 apps, but still wrap the "real" widgets with the XUL cross-platform ones.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Type in mailto:something and you get the following messages. It looks like it reads mime.types. Anyone know what it is looking for?
Can I specify my mail program?
mailto is not a registered protocol.
malformedURI long description goes here.
fileNotFound long description goes here.
dnsNotFound long description goes here.
dnsNotFound long description goes here.
protocolNotFound long description goes here
You really should put your override preferences in user.js so that changes to prefs.js won't be a problem. There is a reason why prefs.js starts with: // This is a generated file! Do not edit!
# Mozilla User Preferences
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This is simply a case of Moz without the load. I use Chimera under OS X, and several Moz variations under Linux. It seems to me that the only complaints about the Mozilla Browser are coming from the WinDoZe camp. Speed, under OS X for example is THREE times as fast as IE, which I have happily deleted from my OS X,2 system, Under Linux Moz is lightening fast. I know... I know that we will be tempted to try all variations on the same theme, but consider this: Mozilla has reached the maturity to be an actual platform!!!!!! oe1..... So Let us all migrate peacefully from our Mickey$lop platforms to other systems, more secure, and less piggy, and less capitalistpigmonopolist. Besides, How many of you are willing to bet that Microsoft didn't open a BIG backdoor in exchange for a certain DOJ immunity?
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
I'm not going to try and load Quake 3 on a P66.
There is a limit to what hardware can do. Programmers always sacrifice cheap CPU cycles for quicker development time, so you can enjoy the software sooner, and in a more reasonable way. That's why Quake3 has a VM for running extensions, instead of "QuakeC" which probably was usable on your P66. Modern software is designed for modern machines. Perhaps Netscape 3 would help you out.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Until Mozilla gets its updates in the form of patches, it'll never be accepted outside the IT community.
Just because they haven't released patches doesn't mean they can't do it.
You simply can't tell the average user that the only way to upgrade a product is to completely erase their old installation and download a new 50 meg version.
1. Full Mozilla install is about 9MB, less than a full MSIE install, and nowhere near 50mb. So when I downloaded the latest MSIE 6 to keep my computer up-to-date, it was a hefty download.
2. You don't have to completely erase your old installation.
"And like that
I don't consider Galeon to really be "lean" in this context. Galeon *requires* mozilla to be installed. The whole thing. so instead of 1 browser on your lean box, you have 2. This isn't very efficient.
Mozilla should publish geko as a library that galeon can use/include then you only need galeon. Galeon 2 wouldn't have to wait for mozilla to catch up to gtk2 and so forth. and THEN, and only THEN would it be a "lean" browser.
Don't get me wrong, Galeon is great. it's my default browser, but having it require another browser in it's entirety is not "lean".
-- DuckWing
Your 4th and 5th buttons don't work? I mainly use Mozilla under OS X with a 5-button and it works flawlessly. However, I also used this same mouse for a while under XP with Mozilla, and it worked just as well there. You may want to check the mouse drivers--until I installed the drivers from MS' website for the mouse, the 4th and 5th buttons didn't work, on XP or OS X.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
fuck off troll
My main gripe with Mozilla is that it still doesn't display some pages correctly. In general, I really like Mozilla and Phoenix, but, they still mess up some pages with tables and images and don't handle some java scripts correctly. For example, lately I've noticed that CNN is formatting their articles in such a way that Mozilla doesn't display them properly yet IE does (example) . If the Mozilla team wants to compete with IE, they should be able to correctly display all of the same pages.
This browser is incredible! I am a long time Moz fan and seeing a leaner alternative thats faster and easier to customize is just awesome.
One of my coworkers was commenting about how he had to run AdAware every couple of weeks, how he'd gotten 30 things since last time. I mentioned that I never had that problem, didn't see why that was a big deal. He mentioned that IE lets applications auto-install in the background, without asking, and so he continually gets them. I said I had none, since I was using Mozilla (well, K-meleon...), and it never did any of that. I honestly didn't think Spyware was that big a deal - but IE lets it occur all the time. Now I see why it's a big deal to him. I'll just keep using Moz.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
nice, fast, small, simple...
ahhh...
no proxy support, but at least i can browse my intranet pages...
ahhhh...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Don't these guys understand the importance of brand rocognition? Releasing a browser with a totally unrelated name really just muddies the waters. It should just be called Mozilla Lite or something so that if people discover and like it then it will expand the mozilla mindshare, not fragment it.
Get a clue moz people!
uhhhm. are you serious? I'm not sure how you figure this is a binary only distribution. Check out the Mozilla website .
With Slashdot open, Phoenix takes up 21MB of RAM. Under the same conditions, K-Meleon 0.6 is using up 11MB and Opera 6.0 w/o Java uses 8MB. All three seemed to take about the same amount of time to start.
Does any of this really mean anything? I my unscientific and statistically insignificant conclusion is that it's a great effort, but it would be nice if Phoenix were even leaner and faster. 21MB is not insignificant.
I'd like to think that even in this day and age an old P166MMX, 80MB EDO, NT4 is still good enough to surf the web. (Mozilla 1.1 is essentially unusable on this dinosaur.)
Even if it doesn't really make a difference as a practical matter, I would hope these bragging rights still mean something to the anti-bloat coder.
The Phoenix/Windows download is 8MB... WTF is lean about that?!!
Hell, Opera is only 3MB (without Java).
No thanks. Not impressed.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
You'd think it would have been ready for this. I sure hope there aren't 100000's of other dependency issues waiting to "emerge" with Gentoo. That'd be a tragedy.
On my system, my memory usage is as follows (with both browsers loaded to www.slashdot.org, everyone's home page):
phoenix.exe 18,924 K
setiathome-3.03.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe 15,320 K
explorer.exe 14,244 K
So, it's not all that lean if it's using even more RAM than IE. In my tests, it actually seems to be slower than IE 6 (XP w/SP1) is at rendering the same things. Color me unimpressed.
A single instance of Mozilla is faster than a single instance of ie, but in my experience the scales tip the other way when you've got 15 browser windows open. ie scales fairly gracefully while mozilla begins act a tad quirky.
I still prefer and use mozilla exclusively, but don't think the battle is wone yet. One of the prices of portability is that it becomes more difficult to exploit platform-specific features... and the optimal method for socket communications in windows is not bsd-style sockets. That said, I haven't looked at the mozilla code so I suppose it's possible they're using iocp like they should be.
Posting links to binaries is useless. Where's the damn source? I want to build it on my os (OpenBSD) against my installed libraries.
Mozilla has just released their own lightweight browser, Phoenix.
Since when has phoenix been a mozilla project? Just because its hosted off their domain doesn't mean its an official project of the mozilla team.. besides phoenix has had binaries out for quite a while.
I'm talking about Phoenix, not Mozilla. Phoenix seems to be available as an x86 Windows binary distribution, and an x86 Linux binary distribution. That's it. Period. No source whatsoever.
------------------------------------------- Just Say no to Windows!
If Mozilla isn't meant for users, then why have a smaller product? Why even have a product at all... it could just be a bunch of reuseable libraries.
You've heard of it right? Well it runs cross platform, only problem is it works at a more basic level than your typical GUI interface...
Maybe someone needs to build on that.
I also have to point out... IMHO customization is over rated. How useful is it really to disable or move the menu bar? Changing colors is certainly important, but there is a pretty short list of things that are actually worth customizing in any "standard" user interface.
An interface that can be hosed in a couple clicks is a headache for everyone.
What happened to the loved "Block images from this server" menu item which appears by default with you right-click on an image.
I haven't tried adding it yet to the drop-down menu, I'm sure it would appear and it seems as if it is possible because the Images stuff is in the prefs, but why remove it from the menu by default? I love that feature.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
This article reminded me that my Mozilla install wasn't working (downloaded a messy nightly build) so I ended up downloading 1.0.1 right after Phoenix. I took a quick look at their file sizes and I was pretty suprised. The full Mozilla install is only ~10 MB and the full Phoenix install is ~8.5. Is it really worth losing all those features for only a small size and (maybe) a small page rendering speed increase?
"When all else fails, there's always delusion." -Conan O'Brien
Agree wholeheartedly with the first reply to parent.
XUL makes it possible to quickly develop cross-platform applications that load like web pages but look like "regular" desktop apps.
That's great news. I for one am tired of using applications that are done with just HTML. It's not what HTML is designed for, and we need something better. XUL provides that.
It's also a potent weapon we can use against IE. I'm convinced that we're in a very dangerous situation right now. If Microsoft can get some of the bigger sites to only work with IE, you can kiss goodbye all hopes for competition in the web browser and operating system market. With its current market share, we're dangerously close to that level. The solution, of course, is to get people to use Mozilla!
And why would end users care about switching to Mozilla? APPLICATIONS!
For this reason, I advocate doing new Web development work in XUL instead of HTML. Not only does it look MUCH nicer than traditional web apps, but it will give people a reason to switch to Mozilla.
I'm currently inhaling O'Reilly's new Mozilla application book. It's available under an Open Content license. (I submitted this as a story to Slashdot but they rejected it!!! Why??? This is HUGE!) The book is a good one and it can really show you what Mozilla is capable of. It is a very slick environment. Please check it out!
If this is a lighter-weight frontend to mozilla, why didn't they just make the normal Mozilla frontend lighter weight? You can already disable mail/news etc on Mozilla; what other features does Phoenix remove?
If Phoenix were native (GTK,X11,etc), I could understand, but it's writen in XUL, the same slow, crossplatform platform that the main Mozilla UI is writen in. So what's the big difference?
I just downloaded Phoenix, lol its slower than IE on my machine. System specs: 486DX 60mhz, 16mb ram, 1024k trident.
"... the biggest trade off for your end users is that your application will never fully conform to the native user interface of the operating system it is run on."
For the life of me I can't understand why people can't handle remembering/using more than one user interface. Are software developers going to have to make everything plain vanilla just so brain-dead web surfers can use their product?
Turn on your brains while you use your computers, folks and take the 5 minutes to learn a new user interface. Maybe you'll see something you like better (like tabbed browsing) that's not available on your interface. Maybe you'll appreciate your "primary" interface more. If anything, it keeps your brain moving and the progressive evolution to better software going!
Ryan
----- rL
I heard of a company called "Netscape". And I remember them becoming the "Netscape Division of America Online". So now I guess they're actually the "Netscape Division of AOL Time Warner".
Point being that there is no company called Netscape. It's just a brand name now.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
I'm assuming that you're referring to a bug in the graphics drivers. Well let me give you a wake-up call. If there's a similar bug in the graphics layer of X, I will have to restart my X server. As far as I can see, there is no difference to me on my single user desktop. Both situations cause me to lose all my runnings apps and any open documents that I might have. With UNIX, I can restart the X server without rebooting, although I've seen Linux lock-up enough times in this situation to know that isn't guaranteed, whereas under Windows, I am guaranteed to reboot. Who cares, it's really just a technicality. I would prefer the extra graphics performance of Windows over X, and of course the far superior rendering under Windows - I can't use Mozilla under my Mandrake 8.1 installation as the font rendering is too abysmal (who wants to view webpages with text zoom set to 200%?), especially below 10 points when it starts becoming completely unreadable.
"Mozilla Jumps on 'Lean Browser' Bandwagon"
(emphasis mine)
What other browsers are (or at least claim to be) part of this "bandwagon" besides Opera? If none other than Opera exist, I think it to be quite an insult for this wise drive in the right direction to be relegated to bandwagon-hopping.
Here's an answer to the proxy problem.
e =2 494&message=31
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?articl
Are there any newsgroups, forums or bbs' that I can use to get help (it started crashing a lot lately for no discernable reason)
Thanks (oh, if it will help to get responses... MS rules/sucks, Bush is the greatest president ever/the worst president ever) there! trolling and flaming sadly seem to get the most responses here
I'm interested in a graphical browser
Such as Links 2.0?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Um, I think IE was not the first popular browser, so IE is the one with the "wrong" layout.
i'm using phoenix right now. it's really nice so far, but one problem is that it will not import bookmarks that have been exported from either mozilla or ie. big problem.
mozilla has consistenly had problems handling bookmarks too. can't ever seem to get them to sort properly anywhere other than the "manage bookmarks" window. i think it's a known problem, but i don't know why they aren't tightening the screws on these things. they are embarrassing flaws.
story read while browsing using ie5
this comment posted using phoenix
very happy - am using a low end pentium 133
with 114MB RAM - tried mozilla several times
before but it wasn't practical on this hardware
and yes this machine dual-boots into debian
woody - which i am still finding my way around in
should hopefully be browsing happily from linux soon
- but meanwhile i've cut another huge chunk
of my ms dependency
thankyou mozilla team
- you have made me very happy
IMO Mozilla's architecture is bogus. Its build on old-style monolithic C++ code. C++ is notoriously hard to get right and mozilla is buggy because of that. C++ tends to execute slowly despite being so close to the hardware due to huge code size and a heap that ends up fragmented and poor paging. Java or Microsoft .Net ® would have been far superiour technologies to build mozilla on, and it would be a lot easier to distribute due to the portability of ECMA CLI/Java code.
I built it overnight (takes a while on an iBook), and posted it up for all to enjoy. It's actually from CVS a little after the release, so it has some goodies like proxy settings in the GUI :)
x .html
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~dmorriso/phoenix/inde
_sig_ is away
Hi, i already opened a thread on the page this morning. Maybe you could help us out, Im a bit new to the world of Linux and therefore im having a hard time compiling it myself right now.
Mine keeps breaking...heres the Link to our Phoenix Thread.
Would be a front-end for remapping keyboard shortcuts.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...