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?"

Comments

Gripe

[MagPulse]

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.

Re:Gripe

[DrXym]

Part of the issue is Microsoft have changed the UI so many damned times that there is no consistency unless every piece of software is contemporary. IE has *never* been consistent with contemporary software.

At least Mozilla tries to fit in. If you run it in Classic mode Mozilla looks and behaves much like any other Win32 application. On XP, it even renders widgets with the theme engine.

As for keyboard shortcuts, Mozilla shares a large set of shortcuts with IE (e.g. cut, copy, paste, find, new window etc.), but if you're a power user the mind boggles why you'd want to use IE anyway. Mozilla has considerably more keyboard shortcuts (and shock horror) some of them are indispensible such as being able to Find Next by hitting Ctrl+G. Why IE doesn't have a Find Next shortcut is a total mystery to me. Outlook Express is particularly hopeless when it comes to shortcuts.

Light Weight

[skrowl]

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.

Re:Light Weight

[asa]

Phoenix will probably never be as small a download as Opera. You can't cram better standards support than opera into an opera-sized package. We can, however, easily trim another MB or two from our download size without much difficulty. I was able to get a local package down 1 full MB smaller just removing a few test files and unused bits and samples. We're working on some build-config changes that will allow us to pull and build less (we're still carrying the weight of Composer even though we're not using it). I expect that Phoenix could get under 7MB without too much difficulty. But it's not going to get down to the neighborhood (2-5MB) of Opera unless we throw away a lot of standards support like our DOM support and other standards that we just do more of than Opera.

That being said, Phoenix download for windows is about 8.4 MB. Mozilla download for Windows is about 11MB, IE6 typical download for win2K is 17MB. Phoenix is by no means the biggest of that group. Opera is to be praised for it's small download size. I just wish they had the same level of support for other W3C standards as they do for CSS.

--Asa

Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?"

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 ;) just runs circles around IE. On Windows, it's just about the same...maybe only slightly slower. And on linux...well, I don't use anything else!

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[nagora]

Would it be so wrong to add in what is needed so IE pages render correctly?

Yes, it would. MS put these things in to make you say that, to make you WANT the standard to be given over to them and force everyone else to play catch-up with IE.

It has to be resisted or there's no hope for quality software and sometimes that can be anoying or inconvienient but that's the price of not letting Bill decide where you want to go to today.

TWW

Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding.

[ClarkEvans]

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.

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Skinned Apps

[spitzak]

Unfortunatly your goals would prevent any innovation in GUI design. That is the problem with toolkits. For instance you cannot use the Windows API to make a pop-up menu that pops up with the cursor pre-pointing at an item. Therefore you cannot use it to make a Motif/Mac style choice (oh, I'm sorry, a "combo box"...), You cannot put buttons into the menu bar. These are all simple things but they are primitive stupid mistakes from 1985 or earlier and we are still living with them because of the inability to modify the toolkit without breaking the programs that use it.

Now it may be possible if, instead of "widgets", people would come up with some "drawing" code. Some elements are pretty consistent: "draw a raised box", "draw a raised box I can press", "draw it pressed", etc. Then maybe systems could use it, most toolkits have calls like this inside them. Then again, even at this level I worry about a complexity and forced design, for instance the obvious implementations would not let you make non-square widgets, while a non-square one would be complex and could be rightly claimed to be too much overhead.

Also NONE of this has anything to do with enforcing consistent shortcuts between applications. From a programming point of view it is impossible. Imagine that they said Ctrl+C will ALWAYS do "cut". Then they say you must write a program with the function cut() and Ctrl+C will call that and you cannot do anything about it. That is what enforcing a consistent set of shortcuts means (Ignore the fact that you could make cut() do anything you wanted, I'm not assumming malicious programmers here). Imagine now you make up a new function, blorg, and you want Ctrl+E to call it. They know nothing about blorg so they cannot possibly call it. Okay, perhaps there is an interface that says "make Ctrl+E call blorg()". Great but what happens when they decide that Ctrl+E means a new standard (say go-to-end-of-line). Does your program stop working in that Ctrl+E stops calling blorg()? What if you relied on this fact? Or does Ctrl+E still call blorg()? Then you have an inconsistent user interface!

The fact is that ALL systems allow the shortcuts to be arbitrarily arranged. The fact is that programs, especially on Windows, are consistent is because the programmers have an incentive to make them consistent. This incentive is always ignored by the people who keep yelling for "single toolkit".

Re:Skinned Apps

[iangoldby]

Mozilla is about web standards, right?

One of the major points about web standards is that a page isn't supposed to look exactly the same regardless of the software used to display it. HTML is not supposed to control presentation. CSS is itself only supposed to be a guide. The sooner we can abandon the obsession with controlling every last pixel the better.

No way! XUL is AWESOME!

[Micah]

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!

One-UI mind

[rlowe69]

"... 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