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

Slowwwwww

[brianerst]

I've installed Moz 1.1 on my WinXP box (a crappy little 500Mhz Celery with 256Meg) and it leaves a lot to be desired on the speed front.

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...