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

[Jugalator]

The Mozilla IE Theme looks pretty much like IE to me, and I'm using IE regularly.

Of course won't solve the shortcut problems and if it's not customizable by editing some file (anyone know?), then I hope the Mozilla team will have that in 1.3 or so.

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.

Re:Gripe

[An Onerous Coward]

Sigh. . . I really don't see what the original poster's beef is with the Mozilla interface. I like it. But every time someone complains that it doesn't act like IE, some other clueless individual responds by posting the IE theme.

People, "look" is only half of "look and feel." The IE theme is worse than nothing. Besides making the UI a good deal uglier (thanks, Microsoft), it leads people to assume that everything will act like IE does. But keyboard shortcuts, bookmarking, getting to the history, changing Internet options, and everything else remains exactly the same.

I don't think Mozilla should blindly follow IE's lead as far as the UI goes. And I use Mozilla enough that I find the differences to be features, not annoying inconsistencies. But the IE theme, whatever its merits, doesn't solve what people seem to think it solves. So stop it.

Re:Gripe

[MindStalker]

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/browser/
or CVS into the mozilla/browser directory
Yes this is a branch os m\b but it became phonix and the m/b project got booted from the mozilla server I guess. Anyways checked out
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/browser/RE AD ME.html
for confermation that this really is phoenix

Re:Gripe

[benwb]

I'm at home right now so I don't have a windows box in front of me, but I'm pretty sure IE will find next by hitting F3

Re:Gripe

[gabec]

If you're not willing to do and try new things, why did you download Moz in the first place? ;)

Re:Gripe

[MindStalker]

of course that should be README without a space but I got filtered

Re:Gripe

[DrXym]

I believe it used to, but nowadays it opens their search sidepanel. The IE online help lists no shortcut for doing a Find Again which is a pretty lame omission if you ask me. And this is typical all the way through IE and OE.

Re:Gripe

[Bishop]

I have the same problem with Windows themed X desktops. I think those themes do more harm then good as it only serves to frustrate the user. Instead of a user sitting down and thinking: "Hey this looks different, I will have to learn how it works." The user sits downs sees a mostly familiar looking and proceeds to get frustrated when it dosen't act the same.

Re:Gripe

[Jugalator]

You can, just check the Mozilla Keyboard Shortcuts [mozilla.org] document

Alright - problem solved then? :-)

Re:Gripe

[fault0]

Um, I read that page again and again, but it doesn't explain how to change Mozilla keyboard shortcuts. It just shows what the default ones are.

Re:Gripe

[Fig, formerly A.C.]

The only complaint I have now

is the lack of the "go button" from IE. I use Mozilla, love the tabbed browsing, but when I cut and paste the URL I'd rather have a convenient button to click instead of having to hit enter.

I'm pretty new, though, so maybe there is a config I'm missing to shut off the search button and replace it with GO.

Re:Gripe

[Tekai]

next try, i think theres a bug in the comment system code, preview as plain old text killed my link although i noticed my mistake and set it to HTML Formatted. Here is the url: http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#keys

Re:Gripe

[sab39]

Edit -> Preferences

The "Navigator" item should be initially selected. If not, select it.

Then look in the pane that says "Select the buttons you want to see in the toolbars". You can uncheck "Search" and check "Go" from there.

(I hate to be mean, but did you actually look for that at all? I mean it's in the first pane that's selected in the Preferences dialog...)

Stuart.

Re:Gripe

[ncc74656]

The only complaint I have now is the lack of the "go button" from IE. I use Mozilla, love the tabbed browsing, but when I cut and paste the URL I'd rather have a convenient button to click instead of having to hit enter.

You're already using the keyboard to copy (Ctrl-C) and paste (Ctrl-V)...why would you want to switch back to the mouse to click a stupid button when Enter is faster? IE's Go button is a misfeature thrown in to appease the AOLers who wouldn't know what to do without it...it's one of the first things I disable in a new Win2K install (that and smooth scrolling, "personalized" menus and other misfeatures).

Re:Gripe

[DrXym]

It's not easy, it's a pain in the ass. Having a modeless find dialog up in order to find again is major inconvenience when you're searching in lots of windows (or panes). The whole point of keyboard shortcuts is they make things faster. Mozilla sensibly provides a shortcut, the IE "solution" is clumsy and unintuitive.

Re:Gripe

[Fig, formerly A.C.]

You're already using the keyboard to copy (Ctrl-C) and paste (Ctrl-V)...why would you want to switch back to the mouse to click a stupid button when Enter is faster?

I surf over lunch. Left hand food, right hand mouse. I lean away from the keyboard so as not to get particles in it. :-)

So, generally, I use right click and copy or paste from that menu. If I type in a URL, I just hit enter, but with a mouse the go button is really handy.

IE's Go button is a misfeature thrown in to appease the AOLers who wouldn't know what to do without it

I've never used AOL, it started with the university access at school and moved to broadband at home. The Go button might not suit your needs, but there are other people who like it.

I'm a fan of open source, but if open source REALLY wants to gain dominance, the software is going to have to have features that the masses are used to: even if the hardcore geeks would never use them.

Re:Gripe

[asa]

In Phoenix do this:
View | Customize Toolbar...
Click and drag the go button up to the toolbar.
Hit the OK button.

Now you have a Go button. Easy, wasn't it.

--Asa

Re:Gripe

[Rick the Red]

WTF are you going on about? In Mozilla 1.0 for Windows the "Go" button is OFF by default.

This is yet another gripe about Mozilla -- they seem to configure it for each platform based on the personal preferences of whoever does configuration for that platform, rather than to some master plan. Mozilla out-of-the-box should look identical on all platforms, and not try to emulate anything else. At least you can change it to suit your preferences; too bad you have to change it if you use more than one OS.

Re:Gripe

[spongman]

use the keypad enter key - you should be able to hit it with your right thumb without taking your hand off the mouse...

Re:Gripe

[mh_tang]

Actually with my IE6.0, hitting F3 opens a search pane on the left side of the browser. If you want to "Find Next", the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+F.

So much for consistency.

Re:Gripe

[Sj0]

Thanks. I really needed a laugh.

I'd take a single user suggestion over one million "HCI experts" any day.

Only for x86???

[hoytt]

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.

I timed it

[Publicus]

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.

Re:I timed it

[Dr. Evil]

I can leisurely launch IE and visit a webpage before Mozilla launches. I mean, I can hit start, run, type in "iexplore", load the default page, click on the location bar, type in my page and load it -- all before Mozilla launches.

Mozilla is the only application I have ever known under Windows to regularly produce the "This application has stopped responding.." window just because it is taking so long to shut a window.

Once it is up and running it is fine. Windows will swap it out, and it takes a good half-minute to pull out of swap, but otherwise it is fine.

Despite this pitiful performance on every Windows 2000 (or NT) platform I have tried(it doesn't do this to me on Linux, and doesn't do it nearly as badly on Win98.), I still use it as my primary browser.

Trust me, it is not my machine, nor is it the dozens of other machines I have tried it on. My Win2k system is the fastest machine I have.

Re:I timed it

[Photon Ghoul]

I've never had the "this application has stopped responding" with a 1.0+ version of Mozilla. I do get it all of the time with Internet/Windows Explorer. Odd that.

Re:I timed it

[Photon Ghoul]

I view ASP pages in Mozilla all of the time. Just so you know, ASP is something that the server processes, which then sends you a page that is rendered in your browser.

How is Mozilla keeping you from viewing ASP pages?

Re:I timed it

[crawling_chaos]

I have a hard time using my online banking correctly, applying for jobs, and viewing a lot of imbedded video

Didn't your mom warn you that looking at all the embedded video would make you go blind?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go shave my palms now...

Re:I timed it

[ivan256]

Trust me, it is not my machine, nor is it the dozens of other machines I have tried it on.

/me types this into Mozilla 1.0.1 on Win2K

The only time I have to wait for anything on my Win2K box (Mozilla included) is when it's spun the hard drives down due to 3 hours on inactivity. With quick launch, the limiting factor in getting Mozilla on the screen is my video card, and I have a Geforce 4 Ti 4200. If I had to guess I'd say it taks 3-4 frames to come up at 1600x1200x85Hz. Granted, my machine is a little faster than most,(Dual XP1800+ w/1GB RAM) but even on older hardware, quick launch should bring up mozilla before you can get your mouse from the start menu to the address bar. It sounds to me like your probelm is that you've got like 128Mb of RAM, and a slowass hard drive, and all your system memory is being used by the OS. (Win2K uses ~100MB of memory on my system without anything loaded right after boot.)

If you include page loads in the timing between IE and Mozilla, it's no contest. Slashdot is loaded practically instantly in Mozilla, and takes seconds to render in IE.

You've only tried really low end Win2K boxes, haven't you?

Re:I timed it

[Malc]

It could be that the MIME settings on the server are wrong. There are a couple of times that I've had Mozilla pop-up a save-as/download dialog for .asp pages. It mentioned text/asp, which lead me to believe that the server was sending back the incorrect CONTENT-TYPE header.

Re:I timed it

[buysse]

You need more memory, son. A HALF-MINUTE to pull it out of swap!? Sheeeiit....

Re:I timed it

[Dr. Evil]

This is such a lame argument. Windows swaps out inactive applications. It just does. That's the way it works. When something is not being used, it gets swapped out to the HDD and more room is made for the drive cache. If IE uses libraries which never get swapped out because MS has crafted the OS not to swap the stuff out, that's a good conspiracy theory, but it doesn't explain Windows 3.1.

Internet Explorer 5 runs on Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. Yes, Windows 3.1 with 8 megs of RAM. They recommend 16, but I've run it fine on 8. You can't practially use more than one window, but it is usable. You certainly can't load up Mozilla in that. My point is not that it is a practical configuration for modern websites, my point is that it has a FAR smaller footprint, no matter how many people claim that it's just the libraries and the quick launch tool. (It's hard to find downloads of it these days... but here's a German version just to prove it.)

When I don't use Mozilla, it gets swapped out to my HDD. It doesn't matter how much RAM I have, it just will. Unless of course, I disable swap altogether, or tweak the registry. But then I would have an app sucking back 40MB of RAM.

My machine is an 800MHz PIII with 256M of RAM. I use more than just Mozilla on the machine. I should not have to upgrade for Mozilla when the machine is overpowered for everything else.

Posted using Mozilla 1.1 on Linux. My last post was using Mozilla 1.1 on Windows 2000. I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.

Re:I timed it

[Dr. Evil]

So you're saying that my machine is fast enough for Lotus Notes, Internet Explorer, Windows 2000, and MS Office, but Mozilla is the only app which woefully underperforms on the system because I don't have enough RAM?

I guess that's evidence of Mozilla's light weight and small footprint.

Re:I timed it

[edremy]

I've got 384MB on my 1GHz PIII. 1.1 is faster coming out of swap, but it will still freeze for 20+ seconds at times.

How much memory am I supposed to add?

Re:I timed it

[fault0]

> My machine is an 800MHz PIII with 256M of RAM. I use more than just Mozilla on the machine. I should not have to upgrade for Mozilla when the machine is overpowered for everything else.

Wow, I run Mozilla on my 800MHz Athlon with 128Mb of RAM pretty comfortably in Linux. It first became really usable when Mozilla 0.90 came out.

Of course, I'll have to agree that the requirements for IE are much less than Mozilla. But for what it's worth, IE 6 is slower than IE 5 on everything except for modern machines. Of course, it still kicks Mozilla's ass in speed and memory usage. If IE had to be cross platform, it'd be slower/use more memory too.

Re:I timed it

[electroniceric]

Brilliant post!

Microsoft like any other company has some good products and some shoddy products. IMO, IE 5 is one of the best products Microsoft ever released. My roommate worked on MSN branding during IE5's final release phase, and when I first saw it, I knew they had made a browser that was simply better than Netscape, whose problems were, at that point, already starting to show.

I use Mozilla because IE abuses standards, and now Mozilla has some great features like ad blocking.

Also agreed. Just tried to write a simple hover method in CSS, only to find that IE breaks that, because it wanted to stay consistent with an older broken implementation.

One huge element Mozilla lacks (AFAICT) is data-binding tools. You can't very well propose to rewrite someone's old FoxPro database as mozilla-compliant web app without some sort client data-caching mechanism. IE, reflecting MS' corporate focus, has methods for this. With Mozilla you have to roll your own. If I'm incorrect, and Mozilla does have I'd love it if somebody pointed me towards data-binding stuff in Mozilla.

Re:I timed it

[Dr. Evil]

Of course, it still kicks Mozilla's ass in speed and memory usage. If IE had to be cross platform, it'd be slower/use more memory too.

I couldn't agree more. Although IE does do some cross platform stuff, but from what I hear, it was the way Netscape used to do it. They have separate codebases. There's an IE for Unix out there somewhere, and of course there's MacOS.

Re:I timed it

[fault0]

> Although IE does do some cross platform stuff, but from what I hear, it was the way Netscape used to do it. They have separate codebases. There's an IE for Unix out there somewhere, and of course there's MacOS.

Yeah, IE for MacOS is a completely different application from IE for Windows. It even has a different (arguably more standards compliant) renderer. IE for Unix, although now discontinued, from what I heard, basically was a port of the Windows version, with a large portion of Windows itself ported :)

Re:I timed it

[legLess]

I timed it, too, and the difference in rendering speed alone is incredible - IE kicks Moz's ass. Now, I've used Moz as my primary browser for over a year, and I don't intend to go back, but let's call a spade a spade shall we?

In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron 750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked the link:

• IE: 1.5 seconds
• Mozilla: 8 seconds

In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.

Re:I timed it

[Dog and Pony]

You must have a really odd setup. I don't think I've ever seen that happen to anyone, although it does happen to Moz once in a while.

Odd that indeed.

I still like Mozilla, and it handles my mail and such instead of outlook. But this sounds a bit on the wishful thinking side. If not, great for you! :)

Re:I timed it

[Dog and Pony]

It is not the machine, you are correct. I have a 1.5 GHz with 256 MB (indeed overpowered for anything else), and it is still exactly as you describe. At work, 1GHz with 512MB. Same thing. Memory is not an issue.

Re:I timed it

[Wakkow]

Which bank site doesnt work well for you? Which job site?

Bugzilla is there for a reason, you know.. There's a thread trying to get CapitalOne's website working. Most companies are willing to help and are compliant. Some try really hard not to help (ie. CapitalOne)

Re:I timed it

[casret]

I didn't believe your numbers, so I also did an informal test on my machine. I used one of the old Oracle docs, 1.5 megs. Same methodology as yours.

IE pulled up the page in about 3 seconds. Mozilla, and Phoenix took about 18 seconds.

In any case, mozilla pulled up the incremental version quickly, so the page was immediately readable. I actually think that mozilla probable did too much incremental refreshes, causing alot of slow down.

In any case, I've been using mozilla as my primary browser since the M15 release or so. The rendering speed doesn't really matter except in pathological cases of database docs ;) Most of the pages load in the background tabs anyhow nowadays.

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

[SquierStrat]

It is funny you say that. From my experience (YMMV) Opera is much slower. I heard how fast Opera was, so I downloaded it and watching as the images diffused before my eyes. Whereas, with Mozilla and related browsers (I normally use Galeon) and also with IE, everything is snappy. Perhaps the Gig of ram (*evil laugh*) helps in that, but should that just make Opera all that much faster too?

On the other hand, when I'm at school and I use the linux lab's ever not so fast Pentium 3 550MHz with 128mb RAM, Mozilla has a hideous load time, and Galeon's is only decent at best. However, once loaded, the page load times are just as snappy as here at the house.

As for this being a step in the right direction...
It is my understanding that the Mozilla project's main goal is to produce the browser engine. So why don't they focus on bug fixes and let people like Netscape and the Galeon project make browsers? Galeon is great (along with a few other Gecko engine browsers) and it very lightweight.

Re:Light Weight

[GigsVT]

Opera is much slower. I heard how fast Opera was, so I downloaded it and watching as the images diffused before my eyes.

From what I can tell, Mozilla and the rest are constructing the page offscreen, then flipping it into view all at once. Opera seems to construct the page in pieces. With Mozilla and the like, It seems there is more delay before the page actually begins to display.

I use Opera almost exclusively, but I just downloaded Mozilla 1.1 to see if it was any better than the 1.0 prerelease I tried last. Moz 1.1 is indeed much better, faster loading, etc.

Recent versions of Opera Linux seem to crash a lot more than the 5.0 series did. With Mozilla improving so quickly, and Opera taking so long to stabilize the 6.0 series, I may start using Mozilla more.

Re:Light Weight

[SquierStrat]

Not just that though, load times for the browser are higher on my machines with Opera. And the page load latency you speak of does seem higher with Opera to me. I use IE on my Windows boots (when I boot into Windows...it isn't often lately) and Galeon in Linux. So, I'm not exactly a militant nothing Mozilla type...I've just had poor experience with Opera.

Re:Light Weight

[duffbeer703]

How is someone bitching about 8MB in 2002 lucid or rational? $20 hard disks is only 40 gigs! Load times are slow, cause I am too retarded to have mozilla load automatically in the background!

Re:Light Weight

[BinxBolling]

How is an 8 MB install file light weight or lean?

Let's see, 8 MB is less than 1/25th of one percent of the total HD space on the computer I bought 2 years ago, and will be an even smaller fraction of any computer that anyone buys today.

That's how it's light weight.

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

Re:Light Weight

[Glytch]

I'm not disputing your experiences with Opera 6.x, but I'm curious what sites crash for you. I'm running 6.03 for Linux x86 and it's nice and stable. 'Course, I've rarely bother with Java, and I switch Javascript off unless I really need it.

(Note to Sun: If you really want Java to succeed, at least try to make your netscape-compatible plugin *not* suck up every processor and memory resource it can find, hmm? Take a hint from IBM's Java VM runtime for Linux. It may not do a damn thing, but at least it does that nothing quickly and reliably and doesn't crash the whole damn X session.)

Re:Light Weight

[Explo]

The point probably is that a few million web pages use DOM to manipulate the page real-time.

Re:Light Weight

[rnd()]

that still doesn't explain why someone would want to pay for Opera only to have a browser that doesn't support many of the standards that are out there.

precompiled XUL?

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't I just read something about certain files in your profile that are basically precompiled XUL for your interface and side tabs?

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).

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:Slow at what?

[iomud]

Chimera is really making great strides in osx, the nightlies i've been trying recently are really quite fast.

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

Could be... I'm using a G4 iMac with 768MB.

After loading it once, it of course loads up very quickly from that point on (I think that has more to do with disk cache though).

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

I haven't really noticed a significant UI slowness in my installs. I'm using the default theme (if it could be called that)... the one that looks like old Netscape 4.x

Is that what you're using as well?

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

Yea, I've noticed that on larger HTML files it tends to take a while to figure out the whole thing.

I'm sure it'll get faster with time.

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

The machine I'm working on is a P-III 800, running Win2K.. It's got a buttload of RAM though, so that could have something to do with it.

Comparably, the Windows UI for Mozz seems faster than the Linux one...but that could have everything to do with my laptop running Linux and having a much crappier video card. :)

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

Well, wouldn't that be considered typical of any application attempting to run with 10% of the CPU's attention?

Mine is admittedly slow under load as well (running Gentoo = lots of background compiling), but I've never really considered it any slower than expected under those conditions.

Re:Slow at what?

[Ctrl-Z]

I don't really find Mozilla to be that slow either, but I just downloaded the Phoenix browser to try it out, and page loads (at least on slashdot) seem to be significantly faster.

It may just be that it doesn't support as many features yet (I haven't really tested it out) but it seems pretty good to me.

Re:Slow at what?

[legLess]

For rendering speed, let me point you to a little test I just ran and posted elsewhere in this thread. I'm not a zealot one way or the other, and I've use Mozilla exclusively for over a year, but IE spanks Mozilla at rendering. If you think I'm confusing rendering speed with start speed, read the post.

Re:Slow at what?

[bdowne01]

Hmmm... Which version of Netscape?

Good timing

[Hieronymus Howard]

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
--

Re:Good timing

[cetan]

Phoenix is based off of the 1.0 branch of code. You're already at 1.0 as far as mozilla is concerned. They call it 0.1 for the projects purposes.

Re:Good timing

[fault0]

I don't think most Windoze users have heard about KDE. And the official name of K-Meleon is K-Meleon, not kmeleon.

Re:Good timing

[fault0]

> AFAIK Kmeleon hasn't been updated in a year.

Actually, new builds come out every few weeks. An official 0.7 (or 1.0) release is due out in a month or so. You can get the latest build from the following URL:

http://kmeleon.sf.net/files/beta/kmeleon065-beta.e xe

Keep in mind that the actual file represented by this URL may change everytime a new build comes out. I guess you have to check kmeleon-dev if you are interested in knowing when new builds come out :)

K-Meleon is still quite a bit lighter/quicker/smaller than Phoenix. The download file itself of Phoenix is almost as large as the full installation of K-Meleon.

All I want...

[jmu1]

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).

Re:All I want...

[roca]

"Turn on nsNativeThemeGTK"
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/sho w_bug.cgi?id=142334

Re:All I want...

[jmu1]

I'm glad someone is looking into the matter. I can't wait till I have my 'complete' theme. That way, all of my gtk based apps and moz will look alike...

Re:All I want...

[asa]

Not just looking into the matter. Someone, (bryner), actaully implemented it. Until we get a crasher that happens with particular linux distros fixed it has been disabled in the Mozilla testing binaries. You're free to turn it on in a build you compile yourself.

--Asa

Re:All I want...

[jmu1]

Nah, it's not quite important enough for me to build it. I'll just wait...and bide my time
::rubs hands together eviliy::

Just installed and tried it...

[Elledan]

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 :)

Re:Just installed and tried it...

[mccalli]

without proxy support its not doing anything for me here at the office.

Look at the release notes and FAQ. You can still use a proxy, but you have to manually add it to the prefs file.

Not nice I agree, but at least the author is aware of it.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Just installed and tried it...

[fault0]

From my WinXP/Athlon 2200+/512mb ram machine, I get these:

useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 MultiZilla/v1.1.22
Mozilla 1.1 with no page open: 18,555K
Mozilla 1.1 open to slashdot.org: 22,388K

useragent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
IE 6 open to nothing: 11,516K
IE 6 open to slashdot.org: 18,092K

useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.1) Gecko/20020919
Phoenix 0.1 with no page open: 17,160K
Phoenix 0.1 with no page open: 19,188K

useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
K-Meleon 0.6.5 (latest beta build) with no page open: 10,928K
K-Meleon 0.6.5 open to slashdot.org: 13,588K

Who knows ?

[tmark]

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 ?

Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[PastaAnta]

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.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[Chainsaw]

What happened to the old and proven Unix approach of "Do only one thing, but do it well!"?

It was destroyed with the release of Emacs, as you might have noticed. By releasing a text editor that also could control your toaster, the Unix philosophy was dead.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[Fjord]

What happened to the old and proven Unix approach of "Do only one thing, but do it well!"?

This philosphy worked well with command line utilities because, via the shell, they could be piped or ``ed or a million other things together to do some impressive things. It was essentially the difference between giving you the API to do exactly what you wanted and giving you a full application that kind of did what you wanted but not the way you wanted.

But in the GUI world, there isn't any piping metaphor because output is nonstandard. Because of this you also can't `` it. So there's no real way to pull little applications together in an easy fashion.

I disagree with the other poster's assessment of Emacs (and I personally don't use it, prefering vi). While it does a lot of stuff as it's base, you can't count all of the things it does as part of emacs. Emacs is an editor that can run lisp scripts. It's the lisp scripts that add the functionality, and so it does still fit into the doing a minimal amount of things well, IMO.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[GodWasAnAlien]

>But in the GUI world, there isn't any piping metaphor because output is nonstandard. Because of this you also can't `` it. So there's no real way to pull little applications
together in an easy fashion.

Nothing really prevents you from using pipes in a GUI application. Maybe shared memory is a better fit.

But in the case of Mozilla, The browser does not need to communicate with the mail reader or anything else.

The obvious solution is to have the independent applications be independent executables.

Netcape and Mozilla was blind to the obvious, causing such things as galeon to form.

This has been my main complaint from Netscape 0.9 to mozilla/Netscape 7.

There is a patch to allow one to specifiy another mail reader. And another patch to only compile the mailnews application. But this is a real pain to do such a thing.

There should be at least 4 code trees ( and 4 separate releases). Mozilla GUI libs, Mozilla core libs, Mozilla browser, and mozilla mail/news. Splitting the released libraries up even more would better, as it promotes better separation, sharing and competition (open source).

The "new" Unix way is to have many shared libraries used by many executables. You install the Mozilla core libraries, then Galeon on top of that. Then install the Mozilla GUI libs, then install the separate Browser and Mail executables on top of the GUI and core libs.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[ftobin]

I've come to believe that there is a flip side to the unix philosophy. If you're not going to do one thing well, you should be flexible enough to be able to do everything well. This allows to the powerful shells we see nowadays (e.g., an ftp client built-in to zsh) and other 'power' programs such as emacs.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[rseuhs]

But in the GUI world, there isn't any piping metaphor because output is nonstandard. Because of this you also can't `` it. So there's no real way to pull little applications together in an easy fashion.

Well there is KParts and other ways to put together modules. For example Kaplan, the new groupware solution for KDE will use the standard KMail-KPart, so you will use the same code in Kaplan and in KMail.

Similar for Newsgroups, Notes and calendar.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[RealAlaskan]

... destroyed with the release of Emacs, as you might have noticed. By releasing a text editor that also could control your toaster ...

This is a common mistake. Emacs is not a text editor, but an operating system, which uses (optimally) a unix for a bios.

Seriously, emacs is an integrated development environment, for the dialect of lisp in which it is written, and most other languages, computer and human. The one thing it does, well, is act as a front end for all the applications which "Do only one thing, but do it well!". It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[Jester99]

It is a frontend for gdb, for gcc, for gcl, for Maxima, for an HP-28-like symbolic calculator, for aspell, and for LaTeX, and for bibtex, and for R, and SAS, and for dif, and for a whole slew of things I can't think of right now. It gives a consistant user interface to all of them.

Hm. And here I thought you were describing bash. And since smoke doesn't pour from my machine when bash loads itself up, I have this tendency to use it, instead. ;)

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Actually they are not combined into one executable. The mozilla binary itself merely loads up XPCOM components. If you don't actually load the mail component, it doesn't load anything related to mail.

Part of the reason that mozilla takes time to load is because it is actually doing quite a lot of work. It's booted Gecko, SpiderMonkey (javascript), the XUL objects, XBL, RDF code, all the artwork, deserializing the fastload multiplex and so on. It gives a lot of flexibility, but takes a second or two more. To be honest I no longer have gripes with startup time, especially on Windows.

I hope Mozilla in the future will be split into a suite of components, that work well together and with a consistent interface.

Snap. Go look at the source. It's totally componentized with consistant and standardised interfaces. Or did you mean the GUI?

Re:Standalone or component in new "Mozilla Suite"?

[rweir]

It's a simple law of nature. Jamie Zawinski(one of the original Netscape/Mozilla developers) says:

Next, I designed, and Terry Weissman and I implemented, the Netscape Mail and News clients, versions 2.0 through 3.0. This was our contribution to the proof of the Law of Software Envelopment:

``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''

Screenshot

[Jodrell]

Here's a screenshot of Phoenix (mirrored here), if you're interested (via Google).

Navigator is fast....

[supabeast!]

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...

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[jmu1]

I'm not sure if that was meant to be a troll, but I'm replying anyway. It's been a few months since I have tried the latest galeon, but it didn't have the same control over cookies, images, passwords etc that mozilla has.

Why not just use I.E.?

[blixel]

If I.E. does what you want, then why do you feel the need to switch?

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[blixel]

Flamebait? Umm... sorry guys. I wasn't trying to start a holywar about Operating Systems. The guy uses Windows and made no mention of Linux. And the TOPIC of this article was about Browsers, not Operating Systems. And my point was simple, if IE does what he wants it to do, why does he feel the need to fix what is already working? If it's purely for the sake of geekdom, that's great... I can understand that. But I'm just curious what his reasons are. It was on topic and it wasn't intended to start a flame war.

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[laserjet]

There would be no reason, I guess. IE just doesn't do what I want, so I use Mozilla. I also use Mozilla's email package as it has gotten pretty good. IE can't control popups or use tabbed browsing out of the box like the big Mo can. IE is also not standards complian, and big Mo aims to be.

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[ncc74656]

Flamebait? Umm... sorry guys. I wasn't trying to start a holywar about Operating Systems.

You more than likely got modded down because your post went against Slashbot groupthink. If you're not rabidly opposed to everything MS (excuse me, M$) does, some crack-addict Slashbot moderator will attempt to blast your post into oblivion. It's what passes for advocacy around here. I'll allow that some of Microsoft's recent actions are less than admirable, but the average Slashbot's reaction to mere mention of the company is puerile.

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[Sj0]

This is a post I wrote a few days ago on a message board. I think it applies here.

I know that I miss some features of IE sometimes...

the ability of low-life scum to use a buffer overflow to set a clients webpage to http://~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ultraporn.com, the ability of low-life scum to use another exploit to install gator on my machine without asking me, the ability of low life scum to add http://www.hotgayporn.com to my bookmarks...

I mean, what is life without low-life scum taking advantage of me? I feel so alone, with my secure, stable, quick web browser.

I also miss the helpful hard disk clattering which accompanies web pages loading on my p500 with 32 megabytes of ram.

I also miss how I can no longer download plugins for my aunts 486/66 running IE5, unless I install Windows 98 and ruin her machine.

sorry, being sarcastic... It's hard NOT to be sarcastic when you see the real-life impact of IE bugs affect people you know.

And to dodge a bullet, you don't nessessarily have to go to a warez or porn site to have this happen to you.

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[blixel]

You more than likely got modded down because your post went against Slashbot groupthink.

Ah yes. Of course. What was I thinking? Let me rephrase my original post. [Toss on black t-shirt for favorite local garage suck-band. Slick back my hair with motor oil.] Ok now then.

Dude .. why the fsck you running IE to begin with? That means you're using Windows, (excuse me, Winblows). It's all about the freedom dude! Get away from that Microshaft stuff before it's too late. Go download a Linux distro right now. No wait, don't download one, that's the pussified way of doing it. Roll your own from scratch! And I don't want to hear any lip about this app not working, or that app crashing... If that's the case, write your own and stop complaining!

Re:Why not just use I.E.?

[Sj0]

Now, here's the thing. In "Billy Madison", Billy went off on a tangent on a book about a boy losing his dog in response to a question about the ramifications of the industrial revolution. It was quite clear he was winging it, and had no idea what he was talking about. In my case, I argue that good reasons for switching away from Internet Explorer are the common and observable effects of security holes which affect the common individual, and that Microsoft will cut off support to their older OSes without a solid technical reason, while other web browsers will continue to support Microsofts otherwise fully functional Operating Systems.

I propose that you have either a low reading comprehension level, or that you are unintelligent enough that the meaning of my post eludes you entirely. If this is the case, I sympathize with your handicaps; however, don't force the rest of us with coherent points of view to "dumb them down" so you can understand a conversation whose context and implications so far exceed your mental capacity.

Have a nice day.

Tried it.

[DeadSea]

They cut out a lot of the Mozilla's best features to make a smaller browser. There is a note in the prefs under advanced saying "your favorite features will be here soon".

Gone:

• Themes. This browser has yellow buttons that look pretty good but a bit bright. You can go in the prefs and rearrange the buttons with drag and drop or choose small icons.
• Ability to block popups without disabling javascript.
• Fine grained cookie management. No more "alert me" and "remember this decision".
• Sidebar
• Chatzilla, Mail, Composer
• Site Navigation Bar

Still there:

• Bookmarks and bookmarks manager
• History
• Javascript Conole
• Download Manager
• Search plugins
• Tabbed browsing
• Cache

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.

Re:Tried it.

[mwa]

There is a note in the prefs under advanced saying "your favorite features will be here soon".

Just for grins, I copied my Mozilla prefs.js over the phoenix version. Theming doesn't work, but the proxy and tab preferences do and it appears to ignore onLoad for popups as well. Apparently, the Edit preferences ability is not done, but using the prefs.js does.

Re:Tried it.

[fermion]

Chimera also has a limited GUI to set preferences, but the preferences may still be there.

Many of the preferences are listed on customization page. To edit preferences, quit the browser, edit your prefs.js file, save it, and restart the browser. Using these preferences, I can set pop up, cookie, window permissions, and other options.

I will agree with critics that say the average user, and even the average programmer, is not capable of reading through the examples and manually setting preferences. But those who can are freed from slow and viral browsers.

Re:Tried it.

[Lumpy]

this is a GOOD THING!

email, chat, html editor, video editor, word processor, toaster , drink mix database, media player, Pong, skins, visual basic interpeter, PHP3, 3d Cad program, sound editing, C compiler, etc...

all these things have NO BUSINESS BEING IN A WEB BROWSER! (Sidebars! those things SUCK! get them out of there!)

I want it to render HTML that's it.. nothing else, keep your damned email out of it, I dont want no IRC in it.. I want html rendering and maybe, just maybe the ability to call a JRE for java and javascript.

what the hell is this fetich everyone has with wanting one program to do 90 bajillion things at once??

Pheonix is a great start! I hope they trim it down even further and keep out most everything on your list EXCEPT the popup blocking... that is important in every browser on the planet.

Re:Tried it.

[asa]

They cut out a lot of the Mozilla's best features to make a smaller browser. There is a note in the prefs under advanced saying "your favorite features will be here soon".

Gone: * Themes. This browser has yellow buttons that look pretty good but a bit bright. You can go in the prefs and rearrange the buttons with drag and drop or choose small icons.

The browser is still themable. There just aren't any themes for it yet. When we get a little further along I'll bet you'll see more themes for Phoenix than for Mozilla (it's about 1/3rd the work to create a Phoenix theme).

* Ability to block popups without disabling javascript.

Wrong. The ability to block popups is not removed. The UI to not block pop-ups has been removed. We just block them rather than expecting the user to dig through a mountain of prefs to turn them off.

* Fine grained cookie management. No more "alert me" and "remember this decision".
This isn't removed at all. The pref UI is broken at the moment (read the FAQ). This is an 0.1 release and not everything works yet. Don't leap to conclusions without investigating first.

* Sidebar

We're going to implement a better sidebar. The Mozilla sidebar is slow and difficult to use. Give it time.

* Chatzilla, Mail, Composer

They won't be part of the Phoenix browser. They will be add-ons/plug-ins/extensions. You'll be able to install them into Phoenix if you want them. Not only that but you'll be able to selectively enable, disable and uninstall Phoenix add-ons (unlike Mozilla).

* Site Navigation Bar

Hopefully someone will build a link toolbar XPI.

This is an 0.1 (first) release. It's not done yet. Give it time. --Asa

Re:Tried it.

[Swaffs]

So what will be missing from Phoenix that's still in Mozilla when Phoenix reaches, say, 1.0? It sounds to me like Phoenix will have all the same features as Mozilla, but will be lighter, and perhaps won't install all the bells and whistles by default. I just don't see where Mozilla will fit into the picture here.

Re:Tried it.

[cymen]

Political need.

Proxy settings

[repvik]

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.

System Requirements?

[teslatug]

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 recently "made the switch"

[rosewood]

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.

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 .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.

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.

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

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[bunratty]

5. Mozilla correctly uses MIME types according to W3C recommendations. If you have any problem downloading files, it's almost certainly a misconfigured server. 6. I never have to enter any passwords into Mozilla, let alone every time I run it. Mozilla just remembers all my passwords for me. Instead of just waiting for a new release of Mozilla to come out, get involved. The first time you started Mozilla, a page informing you of how to do this should have appeared. After all, that's how open source software works!

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[praedor]

I can't comment on most of your points as they do not affect me on linux in general (I usually use konqueror unless I come across a website that konqueror just wont display/open, then I go to mozilla). One thing that I will comment on is memory usage gripes. It is in no way a simple thing to compare mozilla mem usage vs that of IE on a windoze box. Why? Because a significant portion of IE is (unnecessarily) in the core OS and is ALWAYS in memory on a windoze box. Thus, when you start IE proper, your mem usage will go up but not that much because a lot of it is already resident (part of the reason that IE SEEMS so fast vs other browsers sometimes). You pay for IE mem usage at initial windoze bootup, with its unneeded files going into mem from the beginning - giving you an illusion that IE, the app itself, is faster than many other alternatives.

If parts of mozilla's core libs could be loaded at bootup on windoze then you would see a real speedy mozilla browser too.

Oh, one more comment...it would be wrong in general and wrongheaded period to poison html standards with windoze-specific pollution of html. It is not the responsibility of browser builders to support M$ poisoning of widely accepted and correct standards with M$-specific crap code, nay, it is the web designer's responsibility to KNOW XTML and HTML well enough to actually avoid propriatory and exclusionary and useless extra coding and tagging in their web design. If an electrician installs incorrect plug outlets in your house such that you find you cannot plug in most of your appliances, you do not blame the appliance manufacturer for not going along with the spec of one standards-flaunting electrician. You demand that the electrician use install proper outlets so that all your appliances will plug in to any outlet.

Most web designers are morons. They don't know squat about what they are doing and don't think diddle about their users. They just toss something together thinking that it will work as they want it to but instead are loading their site with nonstandard crap tags that break their site for standards-obeying browsers. It is their responsibility to code properly, not the browser creator's responsibility to accomodate stupid, erroneous web design.

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[Luyseyal]

Eh, I'm not sure if your Windows shortcuts will be the same as my Linux ones, but here goes...

1. cycle tabs: ctrl+pgup, ctrl+pgdown. Auto Reload: (not sure. you can do it in Galeon.). Close tab: ctrl+w. No clue about the XP group feature. Is it anything like window groups in Enlightenment?
2. no idea
3. yeah, Galeon allows you to rearrange the menu bars. Moz doesn't appear to on first glance. For stuff like the Google bar, you don't really need the Google bar since the Location bar will fwd the request to Google and open the results in a new tab.
4. IE-specific code: no it's not fixable. If we cede control of standards to Microsoft, Moz will forever be playing the catch-up game. It would be helpful to have a quickie option to make the browser lie and say it's IE, just like Opera.
5. No idea how MIME is handled on the windows builds.
6. Edit, Preferences, Privacy & Security, Master Password. Customize to your heart's content. RE: autofill, I wonder if this is an IE bug where it autofills stuff it's not supposed to cache. Not sure.
7. One reason why I don't use em. :)
8. Isn't that an option in the Windows installer? If not, seems like it should be.
9. There's another post on how to fix this. You'd think this would be an installer option...
10. My understanding is that IE lies about its memory usage. It also can cheat and use undocumented APIs and other tricks to make the kernel favor it.

so anyway, I hope this helps, even if just a litttle...

-l

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[bwt]

Some of your comments are flat wrong. Some are you being unreasonably lazy. I think you have three points that have some merit. Perhaps it's hard for you to shake the Microsoft mentality, but if you use bugzilla to report bugs or request features, people actually do read, consider, and respond. You should try that before you whine about it missing something useful.

To your first point:
Tab reload: CTRL-R
Close Tab: CTRL-W (did you even look?)
A hot key for cycling through the tabs is a good idea. Ask for it and post your bugzilla number so people can vote for it.

2. I don't know what "auto-scroll" is, but how freaking hard is it to hit the spacebar?

3. For searching: choose google under prefs->Navigator->Internet Search. Type your search term in the URL location. Hit the search button.

For customizing toolbars, right click the toolbar with bookmarks, select "Open in New Window", customize to your hearts content. If you are saying that you want to do things like move you URL bar to the bottom, learn XUL.

4. Rendering!? You're examples are choice. You think that Mozilla should render INCORRECTLY so that you can read "bugreports" at microsoft.com. Hmmm.... . And cnn.com has a freaking netscape toolbar at the top and is owned by AOL/TW who make Netscape. They don't use IE's broken HTML.

I have ZERO tolerance for sites that don't follow the HTML standard. Don't visit them, don't do business with them, and don't even ask for mozilla to support them.

5. MIME types. Prefs->Navigator->Helper Applications. If you are too lazy to do this ONE TIME then maybe you should just mail Bill G. more money.

6. I don't use form or password managment, and if I did I would be very concerned with security and privacy, so I have nothing useful to say about your desired features. If you want it, ask for it.

7. Mouse gestures. Another feature I don't use, but it seems many people out there aren't flailing around as badly as you seem to be. Does IE even have this? Don't use it if you don't harmonize with it.

8. I tried a help search for "mailto" and found nothing. Since you've solved the problem, why don't you contact the help maintainer with a paragraph and ask him to add it to the docs. Or submit a bugzilla documentation bug.

10. Moz is a little more memory hungry than I'd like, but it's been consistently getting better. IE is deceptive, anyway. I've been using Moz heavily for about two hours. I'm at 33meg. IE reports about 16meg immediately after start-up, but we both know that large parts of it are "integrated" into the OS and not reporting themselves under the task manager. Your complaint was "speed", which is different. Use "Quick Launch" and Moz is pretty close to IE.

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[seanmeister]

Everyone's covered most of your gripes, except for the problem viewing MS bug reports. If you're referring to the overlapped text thing in the MSKB articles, add the following to your userContent.css: .KBPUBV1 LI, .KBPUBV1 OL LI, .KBPUBV1 UL LI, .KBPUBV1 UL UL, .KBPUBV1 UL UL LI, .KBPUBV1 .appliesto, .KBPUBV1 .appliesto UL, .KBPUBV1 .appliesto UL UL, .KBPUBV1 .appliesto UL LI, .KBPUBV1 .postappliesto, .KBPUBV1 .postappliesto UL, .KBPUBV1 .postappliesto UL UL, .KBPUBV1 .postappliesto UL LI {
margin: 5px !important;
}

works for me

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[alphaseven]

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?

That's what used to annoy me too, and setting mouse gestures to one of the other buttons just didn't feel right.

But upgrading to a later version was much better, now you can cancel a gesture by holding down the button briefly after you stop moving, highlighting hasn't been a problem for me since.

BTW: If you don't like sites complaing that you're using mozilla, you can use uabar to change what your browser submits as a User Agent on the fly, just be careful of the java bug.

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[nagora]

So you're saying that programmers should do extra work and lose their freedom becase some web designer is lazy? Why don't you whine at the designer that made the broken pages? And how do you suggest that browsers cope with a page which is not in HTML anyway?

TWW

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[Khopesh]

W/o a quick way to cycle through my tabs,
CTRL+PGUP, CTRL+PGDN
w/o being to have a tab be automagically reloaded,
they're working on that.
you can currently set bookmarks to auto-check if the site contains unviewed content.
w/o a keyboard shortcut to close the tab,
CTRL+W
I dont see why opening multiple windows and using the WinXP group programs feature isn't any better.
there's an extra click involved, you can't see the names right away, and all the reasons you mentioned above.

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.
phoenix can do this, mozilla themes currently don't (yet). you can shrink but not move or put them side-by-side. try the pinball theme, as it is very compact.

Would it be so wrong to add in what is needed so IE pages render correctly?
yes, because this has already been done to the extent that the standards are not compromised.

Mime types. It is really anoying to click on links like .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.
this is being worked on. you can hold shift then click to immediately download.

I am the only user and its really anoying having to enter a password every time to save the time of entering a password.
there's a preference to set this so that you need only enter it once per session (and iirc sessions don't end with quicklaunch on). it's good to note that there should be an option to never need enter it. somebody should log that into bugzilla.

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?
set the gestures to your middle mouse button (scrollwheels work) or right mouse button. problem solved. (hello, optimoz, please change default!)

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.
IE definately always does that. it's embedded into windows and thus its resources are all buried in everything. mozilla does go a bit overboard, but not as much as you think.

see also mozilla's keyboard shortcuts.

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[rosewood]

Since there were so many replies to my post, many VERY helpful and some with the same-ol same-ol, I figure Ill just go over my initial points with notes from what others have said. I think someone asked what version, and I have tried 1.1 and am now using 1.2a.

1. Knowing the keyboard shortcuts is going to help a lot. Honestly, when I right click on a tab, it should say "Close Tab (Ctrl-W)". Also, every other windows program uses ctrl tab to cycle through sub-windows, but Im glad to hear this is comming at least for the windows build. I am also glad to hear the auto refresh feature is incoming. As for all those that asked, yes this can all be done now with a program called MyIE, or so Ive been told. Most people say over time they have come to love tabbed browsing, so I shall give it more time.

2. Autoscroll bug. In every other windows program, I can click the middle mouse button and a circle appears, and I can drag my mouse up and down to scroll VERY quickly. When I am doing mouse only navigation (just reading through sites), this is a VERY handy feature. It was first introduced a long time ago with the first logitech ps2 3 button mice, and I have grown very acustomed to it. The wheel is nice, but a click and drag of the mouse and I can be at the bottom of a page. Someone gave me the link to bugzilla on this and it has been around for some time and the person the bug was assigned to seems to show no sign of getting on the ball. (I would link to it but I can not find the URL in my history and I am not at all familiar with bugzilla.) The age and amount of replies this bug received made me wonder how well other requests, bugs, etc are handled.

3. Quite frankly I shouldnt have to learn some language just to quickly place my bars in different orders. I am glad to hear that they will soon be mobile and will be easily aranged. I will look at some of the themes that have been mentioned, maybe one will look right. Also, the google bar (as some pointed out) is not just about searching, and I have google set to search from my address bar even in IE. The google bar for moz is very cool and I think the project is great, but I try to keep as much room for the website as possible and it fits very tightly in IE.

4. Rendering. This is probably where I got my -1 troll from :6 ??), does not mean it can not expand.

I think that covers it :P

Re:I recently "made the switch"

[nagora]

display web pages

This is the issue: an IE-only page is not a web page, it's just a page.

If I use the tag <mango> is it reasonable that I expect every browser to know that I mean "make the following text flash black/mango"? Is it any more reasonable if I'm rich?

If Windows has a bug in it that causes my companies application to not work then it's up to me as a developer to code around that bug to make it work.

That's true in the short term. What you are talking about are not "bugs" in the sense that they will eventually get fixed, they a are deliberate attempts to break the standard and force everyone else to be behind the development curve of the new MS-standard. Only an idiot of a developer would agree to that because in the long run it means that MS can put them out of work at the drop of a hat.

They just want a web browser that displays web pages. If Mozilla/Phoenix can't, they won't use it, plain and simple

Mozilla (which I personally can't stand) can and does render web pages. It just doesn't render "some guff we made up this morning"-pages too well.

I know what you mean but I think you are being naive if you think there's no down side to the developers or users of going down this path. The markup wars that left us with confused margin attributes and incompatable JavaScript show very clearly that what you are suggesting makes things worse for everyone in the long run.

Think about this: what does MS get out of making non-standard tags available. It isn't a warm fuzzy glow from helping users.

TWW

Why is Mozilla so slow in the first place?

[Andy_R]

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!

Re:Proxy settings

[KoopaTroopa]

I had this problem as well. I couldn't authenticate with my company's Microsoft Proxy server.

Go to Sourceforge (or it might be Freshmeat; one of the two, but I'm in a hurry) and search for NTLM. NTLM is the authentication scheme used by this proxy. There should be a listing for some sort of NTLM proxy server there.

Download this proxy, set it up appropriately (it's simple; read the directions) and point your browser to go through your local proxy. The proxy will do the authentication for you.

It's written in Python, so you'll haveta have that installed. Other than that it is no-hassle and can be useful for other programs (Winamp mebbe?) that you might want to grant access through a passworded firewall.

Hope this helps.

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

As far as I can tell, with the latest Galeon the only thing lacking from those sections is the ability to restrict cookies to a maximum lifetime (though 1.2.6 adds the ability to limit all cookies to session only). The images and passwords control seem the same, and image blocking is even a little nicer in Galeon (right click an image and you get the more helpful "Block images from " instead of just "Block Images from this Server").

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[jmu1]

Cool. I'll give it another try. Can I import my bookmarks from the moz?

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[Nadir]

Yes you can

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.

Mozilla

[NetGyver]

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.

Hum

[Konster]

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 :)

Re:Hum

[Reziac]

A good basic point: don't make us relearn standard keystrokes. CTRL-O is WINDOWS STANDARD for the Open dialog (it's not just an IE thing). CTRL-SHIFT-L -- where'd that come from??

Re:Hum

[An Onerous Coward]

I have a totally different opinion on this. I don't want the mouse buttons in Mozilla to do precisely what they do in IE. I want the middle-click button to open the link in a new tab. Don't take that away from me just so you can have that ugly little arrow button for scrolling, because the mouse wheel is right there!

Let's not blindly follow IE's lead on the interface, because as imperfect as Mozilla's UI is, IE is no bed of roses either. It's just what people "are used to." My advice would be to copy the relative handful of shortcut keys that are used by the vast majority of people, and then choose what makes sense for the rest.

Example: IE's use of the mouse wheel doesn't make much sense. In Mozilla, if you're focused on a form, then the mouse wheel will scroll around on that form. In IE 6 (which I'm writing on right now), the mouse wheel just scrolls the entire page. Since my hand is already on the mouse, and it's easy to click elsewhere on the page to move the focus, why not add that functionality? In this case, Mozilla's handling seems like an obvious improvement.

Also, IIRC, Mozilla will allow you to scroll around on a page, even if there's a dialog box up in front of you. IE doesn't.

In conclusion, "IE does it" == "People are used to it" != "Good idea". The goal should be to make the best browser possible, not the most IE-like browser possible. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going over to Bugzilla to complain about the lack of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab for switching between tabs. :)

Re:Hum

[squiggleslash]

I don't know if it helps, but CTRL-O does, indeed, open the "Open file" selector under Mozilla (under 1.0 on Linux anyway)

I assume they were trying to keep to the Windows standards, and chose a different combination for Open Link because it technically isn't bringing up an Open File file selector.

Re:Hum

[Reziac]

Okay, then the previous poster was confustulated. NS uses CTRL-0, open file; CTRL-L (no shift), open location. But in that case, what's with the shift?

BTW, I've always heard it as "Mutter grumble bah humbug". Did you learn a different dialect? :)

This is version 0.1, *not* 1.0

[TomatoMan]

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.

Re:This is version 0.1, *not* 1.0

[jacobito]

There will be no Mac version. The Chimera project fills that niche (with a Cocoa UI, to boot).

Re:This is version 0.1, *not* 1.0

[singularity]

Chimera also is an 8 meg download that expands to a 25+ meg executable.

iCab, another lean browser for the Mac, weighs in at about a 2.3 meg download that expands to about five megs (not exactly sure on those figures, I am not at my OS X box).

Feature for feature, I would put it with any browser. About the only thing that it does not have is tabbed browsing, but it makes up for that with some of the most complete filtering and security you could imagine. I use Chimera for the few sites that iCab does not work with, and I keep wanting to go back to iCab.

Want to save your Slashdot cookie forever, reject all Doubleclick cookies, save apple.com cookies until the end of the session, and be prompted for all others? You can do that.

Want pop-ups to work on this site, but not on that one? Done.

Want "Open in rear window" as a contextual menu option? Done.

Want BestBuy.com to know you as using a Mozilla client so their stupid DB pages work and everyone else to see iCab, without ever having to manually switch? Done.

Want to never send "Referrer" headers except for the stupid sites that require it, or to just send referred headers within the same domain? Done.

Want to completely turn JavaScript off on this site, but leave it on for all other sites without manually changing it before entering the site? Done.

Want to reject all images from DoubleClick? Done.

Want a browser so HTML compliant it ships with a validator? Done.

A five meg browser can do all of this on MacOS X and Mac OS 8/9.

This is the type of browser I want to see.

IE 6 SP1

[Winterblink]

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?

Cool Feature!

[mwa]

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!

Re:Cool Feature!

[mwa]

This is in Mozilla as well. It's in there since at least 1.0 (which is what I'm using (Debian's Mozilla 1.0 package)).

Ah, well, I've been using galeon so I hadn't seen it. Phoenix, looks like it could give galeon a run.

Re:Critical Angle?

[Malc]

I don't believe that IE resides in memoey. Perhaps in the disk cache, but that is a different story, and easily reproducible in Mozilla by loading and unloading it first. The reason IE is in the disk cache? It utilises components that many other apps use themselves. That's code re-use, and Mozilla doesn't get involved with that. As for Mozilla's quick launch - that's a dirty little hack that causes all sorts of problems.

If I'm wrong, perhaps you can inform me what parts of IE are already loaded, because nobody else has that I've asked has managed to yet.

Adding proxy in prefs.js doesn't work?

[Eagle7]

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*

Re:Adding proxy in prefs.js doesn't work?

[Eagle7]

Ok, got it, you need to make sure you have:

user_pref("network.proxy.type", 2);

or

user_pref("network.proxy.type", 1);

depending on if you want auto (2) or manual (1).

Re:Adding proxy in prefs.js doesn't work?

[BrookHarty]

Still doesnt work for me. This is in my all.prefs, user.prefs just errors with both user_pref and pref.

Whats the deal?

BTW, Phoenix users 18megs memory, mozilla uses 22megs, is this really a light version?

pref("network.proxy.type", 1);
pref("network.proxy.http", 127.0.0.1");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.ssl", "127.0.0.1");
pref("network.proxy.ssl_port", 8080);

-Brook
-
Jeb Bushs daughter found with rock cocaine, she does no jail time... Uncle Pres. + Father Gov. = no jail time

Re:Adding proxy in prefs.js doesn't work?

[djrogers]

The latest nightly build fixes that little problem... Wow - I'm really diggin this browser!

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.

Opera beta

[Anders]

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.

Re:Posting this with Phoenix

[pointwood]

I just downloaded the app for Win and took it for a spin. Very stable.

Ehhh...how can you say something is "very stable" when you just downloaded it? I'm not saying it isn't, but from the obviously short time you must have used it, you simply can't have any idea about whether it is "very stable".

Skinned Apps

[Masem]

Not just IE, but just provide the standard hooks into the OS's GUI control box, and use that. I don't like applications that have their own 'skinning'; I want to have consistant window interfaces that I can change across the board from one control panel or preference box. Mind you, I have no problem with being able to set what skin a specific application gets from the OS, as one can do with a program like Windowblinds, or that built into KDE or GNOME, but that should be at the OS/windowing level, and not the level of the application.

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.

Re:Skinned Apps

[fault0]

> 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.

Actually, WinAmp 1.2 (the first to have skinning) came out (April 8, 1998) a while before QuickTime 4 did (preview release: May 1999.) kjofol had app-level skinning in a media player even before this, before the author was hired by Nullsoft.

There was a pretty vibrant Windows skinning community in 1998, mostly because of things like LiteStep.

> 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.

But many other people like app-level skinning.

Re:Skinned Apps

[drinkypoo]

I agree wholeheartedly with the lameness of the moz widget code. The fact that there is no native gui support on any platform, even the ones where it really counts due to optimization (MacOSX, Windows) is idiotic.

Tivoli TME10 is a common-codebase cross-platform (though all it was when I worked there was motif on unix, PM on OS/2, and Win32 or WTFever it's called on Win32) app which uses a much lighter version of XUL to define widgets such that modifications work cross-platform. The resulting dialogs are then rendered in the operating system's native widget set.

Why Mozilla decided to go the other route and create its own widget set is beyond me. I know it allows for skinning support but when everyone is putting skinning support into their OS - including microsoft - it doesn't make any sense to re-re-reinvent the wheel.

Re:Skinned Apps

[cduffy]

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.

I'd argue that native gecko-based browsers (such as K-Meleon on win32 and Galeon on GNOME) already fill the niche you discuss.

Being that the Netscape folks already have experience with the cross-platform app thing, I'm inclined to understand their decision to use XPI in their main tree, and leave the work of maintaining native ports to others -- maintaining separate ports is a lot of work, and Mozilla took a long time to take to release as it is. As long as other, native-consistant interfaces exist for those who want them, why does it matter that the packaged, official one is a bit discongruous?

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

[Keeper]

They did it so that a web page that is rendered in Linux looks the same as page rendered in OS X or Windoze... Ie: if you use native widgets you have no guarantees that the web form you made will look consistant across platforms.

Thats the general idea at any rate...

An added benefit is that you greatly reduce platform specific browser bugs.

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.

Re:Skinned Apps

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Actually that's not entirely true. On Windows XP and MacOS X it uses the platform native widgets at least to some extent. I use Pinball at home, and classic at work, because at work I use XP and it looks much better. It's simply a case of implementing the correct widgets - I wish somebody would do that for GTK2, or better yet create a widget toolkit independant theming system.

That's one reason I'm not impressed with Phoenix. Sorry, but on Linux it a) looks like a Windows app, and b) isn't fast. I guess I'll still with Mozilla for now.

Re:Skinned Apps

[nougatmachine]

Sure, you couldn't do any of those things, but why would you want to? There are indeed ways to get the mouse pointer to pre-point at the default choices: you install a program on the computer. Logitech's MouseWorks does this, IIRC. You, on the other hand, advocate ONE application to behave inconsistently with every other. That's not innovation. That is pissing off me, the user. If I want the button to do that I'll install the software that will facilitate it system-wide,damnit. I don't want one single application to think it's cool. Put buttons on the menubar? Are you on crack? Tell me why this would be innovation. Buttons go on toolbars. That is a rule. Similarly, the button to honk the horn is on the steering wheel, not the gas pedal. That's just the way it is.

Furthermore, this does not hinder interface innovation. The innovations will come in future OS revisions, which is when users expect that things will be different. You don't go changing the way Windows works until the next version of Windows comes out.

I know I sound bitchy and cranky, but this is how I get when people try to be Jakob Neilsen when they obviously aren't. A general rule about interfaces: if you don't know what your talking about, don't mess with them.

Re:Skinned Apps

[iangoldby]

Yes, that's a fair point, but it still is based on the philosophy of controlling the appearance rather than guiding it. If the native widget set doesn't support backgrounds on buttons, it is perfectly valid for a standards-compliant browser to render the button without the suggested background.

I'm not saying that it is wrong for Mozilla to provide its own widget set to render buttons with background images if you really want that. But I personally would prefer it to use the native set in order to take on the look-and-feel of the system and to take advantage of native optimisations, and not worry if the appearance of the page varies somewhat between operating systems. YMMV.

Re:Skinned Apps

[Keeper]

There is the "ideal" case, which is what you describe, and what the rest of the world actually does.

You may not care about controlling the placement of every pixel on the screen, but you do want to have some vague control over the layout of the screen. When your widgets are different for each platform, your layout suddenly becomes different for each platform.

When you develop a web page, you don't go "ok, this is 100% complaint code, all browsers will render this and my client will be happy." Instead, you develop a web page, then load it on every known browser in existance (or, at least the ones you think your customers will use). Then you tweak the code until it renders the way your client wants it to look on every browser in existance.

This really really sucks. And no amount of standing on a soapbox insisting that "it'll be ok because it's only supposed to be a guide, and the way every browser handles it will be ok" will change that fact that people want it to look good on all browsers, not just the one that supports features a, b, and c.

The way Mozilla handles it, they just axed about 3 different platforms you'd have to do tweaking and testing on to make the pointy haired boss type people happy. And when you get right down it, the decision was a choice between two evils, and they took the lesser of the two IMO.

Re:Skinned Apps

[Keeper]

Doesn't effect the ability, but does effect the appearance...

No proxy server in this version

[tkrotchko]

Makes it useless at work.

In fact, the entire "advanced" section of preferences is not present.

Maybe next version?

Re:Critical Angle?

[Hallow]

ie does reside in memory. At least most of it does, as it's part of the operating system. (open up the task manager after a clean boot if you don't believe me... - it's there.) The file manager in win98+ is basically ie.

The "dirty little hack" (which has never caused a problem for me) as you put it, is the only way that mozilla can even begin compete against a browser as closely tied to the operating system as ie is, seeing how the OS is closed (making it difficult if not impossible to replace the ie components with gecko bits)

XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[Topar]

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.

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[rycamor]

This is because the Mozilla project is _more_ than just a browser. It is an application framework. (see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/). The scope of what they have taken on is amazing.

I personally think the XUL think was a very far-thinking investment in developer mind-share. Yes, it hasn't paid off yet, but have you actually taken a look at what XUL can do? (point Mozilla at http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/). This is a dream for web-based apps. I am so sick of the standard DHTML/Javascript cruft that I have to use to get a decent GUI. If Mozilla/XPToolkit/XUL (http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/) become a standard, then I will be the happiest developer on earth. It really is kind of the answer to client-side .NET even before .NET was invented.

Yes, at first it was kind of slow, but that is because thay worked on features first, performance last. Honestly, with the hardware that is available nowadays, is performance really a problem? The average user can have a machine that only 5 years ago would have been considered a supercomputer, capable of rendering fullscreen realtime 3D at 30 fps, or better, so what's the problem compiling a little Javascript? On my "older" PIII 600, or my AMD 550, or even my Celeron 500, Mozilla seems to perform well, in both Windows and Linux. I personally don't see where the problem is. 1.5 Ghz machines now don't even cost $600.

There is always a trade-off between performance and features, but I think the Mozilla project took the long view, and I hope we will eventually see an XUL-type interface available for any GUI, on any platform. Goodbye .NET!!

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[Animats]

Agreed.

Here's the list of available XUL applications. There is only one (1) XUL app. It's called "Preferences Toolbar 2". Big deal.

Give it up, people. Nobody is going to write applications for Mozilla.

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[rycamor]

I don't really think it is about Netscape or AOL. The people who worked on the Mozilla project were not necessarily working on a specific corporate project; they were working on an open-source _idea_, which has some far-reaching benefits.

Yes, I agree that there needs to be more organization, documentation, and in general more attention paid to this project for it to catch on. That's why I am posting this. I hope more of you reading this will realize the potential that is here, and maybe contribute some...

As for it's usefulness as an application dev platform, at least one company has made a pretty nifty commercial product out of it. ActiveState's Komodo was written with the Mozilla framework. It is not a toy: it is actually a fairly capable programmer's IDE and text editor. I was surprised. Yes it is not as fast as a native C++ app, but it is definitely better than an IDE using Java for it's GUI engine (Zend, anyone?).

One great thing about this framework is that it doesn't try to be everything, like so many other frameworks out there. It concentrates on client-side UI, letting you do server-side, or even client-side logic in whatever language you want. Since it is XML-based, it is a natural for any language with XML/XSLT capabilities, which is just about every server-side scripting language these days.

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[rycamor]

Wrong. There are many more at MozDev, as well as links to other Mozilla/XUL sites. Also Komodo , a commercial product was written with Mozilla. Activestate is actually making money with this.

O'reilly is taking this seriously. Maybe they know something you don't ;-)?

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[asa]

Here's the list of available XUL applications.

Substitute "a" for "the" and you sound a little less uninformed. Try http://www.mozdev.org for a larger list. And guess what, the hundred or so projects there aren't the end of it either. There are all kinds of smaller projects (and even some larger ones) that are hosted on their own sites.

--Asa

Re:XUL is holding back Mozilla project

[IamTheRealMike]

It really is kind of the answer to client-side .NET even before .NET was invented.

Yes! Exactly, you hit it on the head. Mozilla is the open source answer to .NET, a fully featured development platform. However, this is the real thing. .NET is really just Java done better on the client side, despite what MS say about it being a "platform for XML". No really, that's what they say. Yet how do you construct GUIs in it? That's right, by having Visual Studio generate code for you.

Pah. Mozilla is a platform for XML, and an amazing platform it is too. It's not just XUL, though that's what gets all the press. It's XBL (xml components), RDF (generic data structure templates, mondo cool, makes synching ui and data much easier), XSLT, inline SVG and so on. If you reading this and don't have a clue what I'm on about, then spend a few hours investigating. Read up on the W3C specs and see how neatly they all dovetail into each other, be amazed at the sheer power you have with them. Then see that Mozilla has filled in the missing pieces and is an XML platform done right.

Now start wondering if your next project can be written in it.

How about RAM footprint?

[ChrisWong]

Subject says it all. Does this reduce Mozilla's elephantine bulk? Top output, anyone?

Re:Critical Angle?

[avdp]

iexplore.exe does not reside in memory, however, ieexplore.exe is just a shell for the rendering dlls (and other dlls that that make web browsing on windows possible). It's not that hard to figure out really, explorer.exe relies on those components also and it is always running. Ever tried typing a URL in the My Computer address bar?

Works well.

[miffo.swe]

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.

Re:Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding.

[mr3038]

Mozilla needs some marketing oriented types instead of more nerds.

Ever heard of company called "Netscape"? Mozilla isn't meant for end users. Quote:

Mozilla is an open-source web browser and toolkit, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability. Mozilla.org provides binaries for testing and feedback.

(emphasis mine)

Re:Proxy settings

[tkrotchko]

I took the proxy settings from Mozilla in the prefs.js and transferred them to phoenix, and it didn't work.

Very nice!

[13Echo]

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.

Re:Ahhhhhh .... Lovely

[Bazzargh]

errr... thats the /same/ renderer, dude.

If you really are seeing performance difference in /rendering/ between moz and pheonix, its because you don't have enough memory (ie its having all the other moz features in memory thats causing the trouble).

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[jmu1]

Well, I've installed 1.2.6-1 and it doesn't use the widgets from gtk and it doesn't have the sidebar(that I can see). I like my sidebar, and the whole reason I wanted to try galeon was for gtk integration. If you know how to make that work, I'll keep it, otherwise, Mozilla launches just fine on my box. :) Thanks

Is the javascript support updated?

[tkrotchko]

I haven't used it since 4, but the lack of up-to-date Javascript support in Opera was disappointing.

Running into the limit of dial-up

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Running into the limit of dial-up

[alienmole]

Downloading 8MB over a modem is not a big deal. It's not as though you have to do it all the time. I live in the boondocks with no broadband, and I regularly download files of 30+MB (software development stuff, mainly).

Besides, Opera is only now becoming compliant with current W3C/DOM standards; before the latest version, it was the least compliant browser around. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the 3.4MB figure quoted was for the older, non-compliant version. If not, props to Opera, but I still don't think a few MB either way is a huge deal for a graphical web browser.

Re:My complaint about Mozilla...

[leoboiko]

There's a reason for the red color. Initially he was green, but then they received a love letter from Toho's (Godzilla owner) legal department.

And Mozilla mascot is cool. You should see OpenBSD, *that* is a stupid mascot.

Re:Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding.

[Planesdragon]

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.

Ever heard of "security"?

[FyRE666]

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...

Re:Ever heard of "security"?

[naChoZ]

Another good way of protecting yourself from ads and bad javascript and the like is a free little app called Proxomitron. Because it's a proxy based app, it works with both Netscape and IE nicely. Since I tend to use both when I'm on a windows box, I find it makes my browsing much much cleaner.

Re:Ever heard of "security"?

[djrogers]

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.

Well then why in heaven's name did you install Gator? I've never, ever, ever, had Gator on my computer - it doesn't just 'magically' appear you know...

Re:Ever heard of "security"?

[FyRE666]

Erm, it does on the default install of IE6. I've certainly never agreed to it, but it turns up. I now have the browser set to prompt when an activeX control wants to install itself etc. It surprised me when I ran Ad-aware and saw 9 known scumware tools infesting the machine.

I also have most advertising sites pointing to localhost, amazing how much faster things are! I still let a few such as geektools, sourceforge etc through though. The ones that are really p*ssing me off these days are those flash ads that move into the center of the damned page so you can't read the content/Pr0n ;-)

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[jmu1]

I tend to like running 'stable' software. I'm not about to go delving into CVS, no matter how stable it actually is. There is a good reason it's there and not on the list of downloads. I don't use Gentoo, so that's right out. Perhaps in another few months it'll be where I want to be.

Re:Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding.

[mcrbids]

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)

Re:Karma to burn

[13Echo]

"Presto", change-o...

Opera 7 is coming soon. I'm pretty psyched, and I hopethat it is going to use QT3 on Linux this time (Instead of 2.x). It supposedly will have the better DOM and CSS support this time around. I love Opera. It's a great peice of software, but just has these little things that keep it down right now.

Overall though, Phoenix is looking like a nice way to run Mozilla. It may even get me hooked.

Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

So, I have and old Pentium 66 with 20MB ram running in my workshop. I just want to use it for some casual web browsing. It's currently running Red Hat 7.3

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!)

Re:Is it really lean?

[crush]

How did you get Red Hat 7.3 to install in 20Mb? Red Hat's minimum recommended install is 64Mb, and you can get away with 48Mb, but you must have done some exciting tweaking to get it to install in 20Mb!

Also what desktop are you running? I've had no success with either Gnome or KDE in 32Mb. And what window manager?

Re:Is it really lean?

[Lord Omlette]

Lynx. It's lean.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

How did you get Red Hat 7.3 to install in 20Mb? Red Hat's minimum recommended install is 64Mb, and you can get away with 48Mb, but you must have done some exciting tweaking to get it to install in 20Mb!

It forced me to do a text-mode install, and turned on the swap space early, but I didn't have to do any amount of tweaking.

Also what desktop are you running? I've had no success with either Gnome or KDE in 32Mb. And what window manager?

Desktop? We don't need no steenking desktop!! I'm not even going to try.

As for a window manager, I'm currently running fvwm2. I can't figure out how to get it into fvwm95 mode though.

I've heard a lot of good things about IcwWM, so I'll probably give that a shot.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

Lynx. It's lean.

Yes, but any browser that doesn't handle tables nowadays really sucks.

I suggest you have a look at links instead. Much better.

And in case you couldn't guess, I'm interested in a graphical browser. :-)

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

With the low computation throughput of older computers, it's not really worth the energy expense keeping them powered up and "computing".

Electricity is pretty cheap. It's not worth buying a $500 machine just to save a couple dollars on electricity.

I power off the monitor when not in use though :-)

Re:Is it really lean?

[blakestah]

Drop X and use w3m or lynx or links text based browsers.

Or, go into X, but keep it at 8 bit color and low resolution. If that works, bump up the resolution and/or color until you find a happy medium.

If you do run X, choose a lean window manager, like twm or pwn or blackbox or fluxbox.

libXm.so should be installed with X in /usr/X11R6/lib. Try adding a symlink from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so to whatever version you have installed there and running opera.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

libXm.so should be installed with X in /usr/X11R6/lib. Try adding a symlink from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so to whatever version you have installed there and running opera.

Actually, libXm.so is part of openmotif, not X.

I found the solution to getting opera working under RedHat 7.3 here.

Re:Is it really lean?

[crush]

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought it would work. Around how long did it take? I should give it a shot just for the interest factor. Have you thought about using XFce as a lightweight desktop? Anyway, thanks for the info, always good to know what can be actually done.

Re:Is it really lean?

[cobar]

You might try getting a version of w3m or links with image support compiled in. They'll still run in a terminal, but they render images inline.

Expecting modern browsers to run on a computer that old is pretty ridiculous. Older browsers had much simpler parsing routines because they didn't have to support CSS, DHTML, or any of the other new technologies. And, as time goes on it's more worthwhile to do things quickly/maintainably than to squeeze out the last bit of performance for an increasingly smaller number of slower computers

Re:Is it really lean?

[rweir]

Why not take an old version of Netscape for a spin?

Netscape 4.77 download page

Yes, it's slow and clunky and crashes like drunken fratboy in his dads' truck, but it is less memory hungry than Mozilla.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

Expecting modern browsers to run on a computer that old is pretty ridiculous.

I don't know why so many people say this. I've already found two modern browsers that run very well on this machine: Opera and Dillo. Making statements like yours is rather ridiculous when there is evidence to the contrary.

I might try links 2.0 - it looks promising. Elinks comes with RH73, and it's the best text-mode browser I've ever used. Much better than w3m and lynx, IMHO.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

Why not take an old version of Netscape for a spin?

That might be a viable option, but I'd probably have to go back to Navigator 3.x. I've got Navigator 4.79 on another RH73 box, and it's a bit too big for my P66:

~> size /usr/lib/netscape/netscape-navigator
text data bss dec hex filename
6582674 1082072 271876 7936622 791a6e /usr/lib/netscape/netscape-navigator

That's nearly an 8MB image, which is much too large for a machine with 20MB main memory.

Re:Is it really lean?

[cobar]

Not that I care that much, but Dillo is not a modern browser. It may have been developed recently, but it lacks a lot of stuff any modern browser should have - CSS support, javascript, SSL. They chose to be quick by writing in C and being non-portable (to windows at least), whereas Mozilla for example virtualized everything in order to allow applications to be built, more portability, and possibly better maintainability. Dillo is a sorta browser, it's really only at the level of an unpolished Netscape 3: capable of displaying basic pages but not anything very complicated.

Opera is a lot better, but they're having to rewrite their rendering engine in order to support DOM1 & 2 better. We'll have to see how they perform once that's done. Can't say I like Opera's interface much either - especially on Linux but on the whole it's a pretty decent browser.

Re:Is it really lean?

[bgarcia]

Not that I care that much, but Dillo is not a modern browser....it's really only at the level of an unpolished Netscape 3: capable of displaying basic pages but not anything very complicated.

Dillo is modern in that it is currently being developed, can be run on modern operating systems, and is attempting to support the most recent html specification - HTML 4.01. What you are describing is a lack of features and lack of portability. It's still quite capable of displaying most of what I want. Slashdot & Kuro5hin look just fine in it, for example.

Netscape 3 turns out not to be an option for me. It won't run on modern linux kernels. I forget what version of HTML it supports, but it's certainly not 4.0. This is definitely not a "modern browser".

It won't work under Gentoo alongside mozilla

[io333]

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.

Re:Font rendering is better ?!

[13Echo]

Phoenix seems to be using a release of Gecko dated 2002.9.23. That is significantly newer than the 1.x release I have of Mozilla. I am willing to bet that unless you get an Alpha or CVS-type release of Mozilla, that it will render a good bit differently.

A good example is www.microsoft.com. My copy of Mozilla isn't perfectly new by any means (1.1a), but it has a Gecko build date of 2002.06.11. Three months difference seem to make a big difference in rendering. The "search" box is placed improperly in Mozilla 1.1a. In Gecko and Opera 6.05, it looks great. Of course, this is probably because someone (ahem- Microsoft) broke it on purpose. Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway. I've noticed some other differences in text too, so your observation is correct.

Galeon with three widget styles

[Redline]

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.

Re:Galeon with three widget styles

[roca]

> Call me when

"Turn on nsNativeThemeGTK"
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/sho w_bug.cgi?id=142334

So what's your number? :-)

Re:Galeon with three widget styles

[kubrick]

the "mozilla native" widgets, which are unthemeable by any means

the page author can set the the look of these with CSS, or the browser (& the person viewing them) can do it with user stylesheets, AFAIK.

D'oH!!!!

[Fig, formerly A.C.]

FSCK FSCK FSCK!!!

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.

Re:Critical Angle?

[fault0]

> relocate DLLs in memory as they load, initialize all of it's components, run through its start-up code

This is done for IE when explorer runs in Win98+.
Coincidently, the last time I removed IE (in Win98.. not sure if it's even possible anymore), win98 started quite a bit faster.

Re:Almost enough for me to ditch IE....

[roca]

On WinXP Mozilla's Classic theme renders using the native Windows theme.

Win2K doesn't have the hooks we needed to support that.

Re:Ahhhhhh .... Lovely

[13Echo]

See my above post about Gecko.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=40580&thresh ol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=154&mode=nested&cid=4318 699

Unless you have a newer, or alpha build of Mozilla, you are probably using a significantly older, stable release of Gecko. Phoenix's Gecko is dated as of yesterday, therefore it is *not* the same renderer.

Close button on tabs...

[horza]

... is a reason I'll be sticking with Galeon. Such a well thought-out browser. Kudos to the developers.

Phillip.

Re:I've seen this before!!!

[roca]

Galeon doesn't run on Windows. Phoenix does.

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[_|()|\|]

it doesn't use the widgets from gtk and it doesn't have the sidebar

If you were expecting HTML widgets, like form buttons, to come from GTK+, then that is way beyond the scope of Galeon, or any Mozilla-based browser. All the window decorations and dialog boxes are GTK+.

As for the sidebar, that's the first thing I turned off in Mozilla. You can dock the bookmarks toolbar on the left, instead of the top, but I'm not sure that what's you're looking for.

Re:If you want a fast browser

[hkmwbz]

Unfortunately, Dillo doesn't quite cut it in the real world, IMHO. It doesn't seem to support a lot of the things that make Opera and Mozilla winners. Mozilla, at least partially, sacrifices speed for features and usability (on slower machines - newer systems shouldn't notice much). Dillo sacrifices features and usability for speed. Opera goes somewhere in-between them.

But I never quite got the hang of Dillo. Perhaps you should try Opera 3.62 instead. It seems to be incredibly fast, and it still supports JavaScript, CSS, and everything. But not DOM of course.

Re:Critical Angle?

[fault0]

> It is not done for IE when Explorer runs if you've checked the box for running new windows as separate processes

Is the available for > Win98? I haven't seen it since then.

> processes don't fork under Windows, they start fresh.

Yes, but the dll's would have already loaded?

Re:what is Galeon missing?

[jmu1]

Well, I've had just dandy luck on several sites using the gtk widgets(scrollable selects and buttons). I'm talking about the program and the internals. And no, it's not beyond the scope of the program to do so. Take a quick look at your scrollbar. Does it looked themed? Do the menues theme correctly? No. That is what I'm talking about.

sweeeet!

[sootman]

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?!?!?

!!!!! :-)

Sigh.

[Inoshiro]

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.

Although

[Inoshiro]

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:
# Mozilla User Preferences // This is a generated file! Do not edit!

Re:Although

[mwa]

Yes, but pref.js is where Mozilla stores all the preferences that are edit-able via the (non-existent in Phoenix) preferences dialog, and that's what I wanted to copy.

Still, your point's well taken for preferences NOT managed through the dialog.

I remember running games on my 486

[Inoshiro]

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.

Re:Critical Angle?

[Dog and Pony]

Wrong. I've never had any other install than the memory-residing one, and even when I'm nowhere close to maxing out memory it is still *way* slower. Currently at 1.1.

About crashes... well, it does rarely crash. But it hangs when you don't use it for a while. :)

And yes, I've plenty machine.

Bullshit

[tswinzig]

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.

galeon not that lean

[DuckWing]

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".

5-button mouse

[ZxCv]

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.

Re:Critical Angle?

[spitzak]

DLL's are both *services* (or daemons in Unix terms) and shared libraries. They are *already* "started". The comparison is like comparing running "cat" on Linux with loading all the disk drivers and mounting all the disks and then running "cat".

It is pretty pathetic that the Window's defenders don't even know how their system works.

Re:Critical Angle?

[spitzak]

As I pointed out in another post, the DLL's are ALREADY "initialized". They are not just shared libraries, but also Windows method of making modules/daemons.

A single DLL has a single SHARED piece of memory and an init that is called the FIRST time it is loaded (not the first time it is loaded by an application). I think it can even launch a thread and have an event loop.

Therefore the IE DLL's are already "loaded and initialized".

Goddamn, it's not even a bad idea, and you Windows defenders will ignore it in order to try to make your stupid point.

Also that's why a rendering bug brings down the entire desktop rather than just IE.

I wondered why Ad-Aware was such a big thing...

[mbourgon]

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.

My super bogus comparison test.

[Rachael Leigh Cook]

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.

Re:Bookmark Sharing with Moz?

[SteelX]

Anyone know how to make Phoenix share bookmarks with old Mozilla?

If you just want to copy the bookmarks over from Moz to Phoenix, just copy the old bookmarks.html from your Moz user profile directory to the Phoenix user profile directory.

If you want to share bookmarks, I *think* you can try making a symbolic link for bookmarks.html in Phoenix to point to your Mozilla user directory.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this and I'm not sure if it can be done! Theoretically, it should though. And because it uses symbolic links, this works only on Linux/UNIX variants.

For example, if your Moz user profile is in ~/.mozilla/default/xxxxxxx/ and your Phoenix user profile is in ~/.phoenix/default/yyyyyyy/ then you can enter the following commands:

cd ~/.phoenix/default/yyyyyyy
ln -s ~/.mozilla/default/xxxxxxx/bookmarks.html .

Again, I haven't tried this yet, and I don't know if it can be done. So please try this at your own risk. Make a backup of your Mozilla bookmarks.html first.

If it works, let me know. :)

Lean?!?!

[jbuilder]

The Phoenix/Windows download is 8MB... WTF is lean about that?!!

Hell, Opera is only 3MB (without Java).

No thanks. Not impressed.

since when has phoenix been a mozilla project?

[Suppafly]

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.

OpenGL

[ebyrob]

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.

Can't Block Images

[akiaki007]

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.

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

Re:Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding.

[dhamsaic]

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.

is it really that much of a bandwagon?

[xmnemonic]

"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.

Re:Critical Angle?

[spitzak]

Oh come on. There is another "initialization" that is run the first time the DLL is loaded. It is well documented. It does not create a process, but the DLL is occupying memory and large amounts of data structures have been initialized and are reused by every instance. This represents a significant amount of startup time.

It is also a very good idea and I am flabbergasted that people will deny a feature of Windows just to win the "IE is faster" argument.

Re:Graphics driver bugs

[spitzak]

Hey, here is somebody that gets it!

Yes, it is exactly like X and a crash in the rendering brings the whole system down. Since X is more the level of the Win32 GDI however this is not quite as likely as a bug in html rendering.

Now back to the original argument. The speed of IE verses Mozilla. You should now compare the speed of starting Konquerer on an already-running KDE desktop with the speed of starting X and Mozilla, if you want the same type of comparison as being spouted about IE versus Mozilla.

Now there is nothing wrong with putting html rendering in the system, or as a service. In fact it is a HUGE win because it makes programs needing html rendering FASTER! But this is the reason IE is faster and every IE defender here seems to be trying to claim that that is not the reason, instead of logically saying that perhaps MicroSoft's design is better?

Links 2.0 has graphics and JavaScript

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

I'm interested in a graphical browser

Such as Links 2.0?

switched

[solferino]

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

Build made for Linux/PPC

[Eagle7]

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 :)

http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~dmorriso/phoenix/index .html

Re:Mozilla obsolete from the start

[epine]

C++ offers a superset of C and Java programming styles. The only way you can dig yourself into the the FUD quagmire (which so impresses the author of the previous post) is to make bad choices about applying the appropriate C++ facility to the appropriate problem.