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Phoenix 0.2 Web Browser: Lean, Mean Mozilla
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit reviews the Phoenix 0.2 web browser: 'I've never been a huge fan of the Mozilla web browser. It's too big and too slow in my opinion. I like the Opera web browser a lot, but it is closed source, ad supported (for the free version) or costs money (if you want to get rid of the banner ads). Opera is almost exactly what I'm looking for in a web browser as far as features are concerned: fast, browser window tabs, mouse gesturing, and I can configure the interface a little. It has its problems, no doubt. Java and Javascript are big tripping points for it to name just a few. But speed is what I'm looking for.
Then along comes Mozilla's Phoenix web browser.
Phoenix still uses a lot of the Mozilla code. In fact, Phoenix code is based completely on Mozilla code, so the development should move rather quickly. Here is a link to a road map for what it's developers think is a close time-line for its development. Although still in heavy development, I have found Phoenix quite useable and stable even in the early 0.2 release and I continue to download the nightly release every day.'"
Here is the link to the roadmap: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-ro admap.html
neurostarjust installed this over the weekend on my SuSE 8 StinkPad and i have officially removed all other browsers except opera (i can't live without it ...) one of my co-workers had me trying release 0.1, and it wasn't bad, but it didn't have proxy support and a couple of things were buggy. talk about a huge update! 0.2 is sweeeet, get it now.
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
Since about Mozilla 0.8 or so, Mozilla has rendered faster than any version of IE. The startup times left a little to be desired, but a lot of that is fixed by Mozilla's Quicklaunch option.
Sure it uses RAM, but so does IE, and not in "IEXPLORE.EXE" either - most of that code is integrated right into the Windows Explorer code.
A lot of people who have claimed Mozilla is "too big and slow" have never used a 1.0+ build I would assume, or are trying to compare Moz for Linux (which is =much= slower than it's Windows counterpart), with Moz for Windows.
For those of you looking for it's main page, it is. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/ You can download from there.
full porn support
I noticed that loading large tables of thumbnails is quite slow on Mozilla. Very slow compared to other browsers. 100+ images can really task Mozilla. Checking Bugzilla, it seems to be a known problem, but I couldn't find an exact bug for this problem, a few evangelism bugs on coding styles mostly.
Someone is working on Mail & News as a separate app... it's called minatour. There are documents on mozilla.org about it. Still no binaries to download though.
There is only one thing missing that may force me back to mozilla: the inability to "block images from this server," i.e., to get rid of ads.
That feature is targeted for the 0.3 release (October 8th) according to this (search on page for 'Image blocking').
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
If you like Dillo, but it doesn't have the features you need, try Links. No, it's not Lynx, it's a graphical browser, and it's fast.
Have you tried Chimera?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/chimer a/
Has GUI as nice as OmniWeb and a Gecko rendering engine.
It rocks.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
When will people understand the difference between tabbed browsing and MDI windows?
I really prefer Opera's MDI windows. Because I am able to view more than one windows at a time but still can hide/restore all the windows with a single click. I just like it to move my "surfing workspace" around quite fast (i.e. with ONE click) but still have the advantages of "normal" windows.
It's practically the same mozilla code, only that some features are removed, like mail, so the result product is very small, but it still uses XUL, which is the main cause of mozilla slowness.
I downloaded it to test on my amd 333 64mb laptop, but it is still too slow for me to use.
However, it's a little more usable in this laptop than mozilla itself.
I want a fast, small browser with tabs, java, javascript, flash and saving passwords. There isn't any right now, being Opera the closest one. Problems: adware, no password saving.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Gone but planned:
Still there:
Most of the stuff that is gone but planned just has a broken UI. You can set the prefs if you want to edit your javascript config files or copy the config files from your mozilla directory. Exceptions are the sidebar and the site navigation bar which need to be written. This information comes from my 5 minute review of the browser that I posted last time and the followup comments to it. (My apologies to Asa for getting a few of the details wrong in my first review)
We can write software to manage checkbooks, to run space shuttles, to even serve more porn than the world ever needs.
But we can't get a decent browser out the door.
Why? Why is this?
Because a browser that does what you want it to do is significantly more complex than any of the three examples you gave.
Turn on enable pipelining in preferences->advanced->http-networking, it greatly improves your porn browsing-speed.
For the curious, Mozilla and Phoenix are still pretty slow when doing XSLT with large XML docs, compared to things like Xalan.
Funny you should mention porn support.
One of my favorite web browsing features comes from a project called Pornzilla, an effort to turn Moz into a better poon-viewing platform.
At the link above, there's a neat little javascript-bookmarklet which will open a new window and populated with all images linkd to on any given page. You can then save just the images en-masse or view them without clicking to and fro a bunch.
Yes, it's a neat invention for porn surfers. It's even better for any kind of web artwork or to check image links on a page you're developing. Unfortuneatly, it chokes on donkey balls on sites that check referrer headers before serving images.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If you'd like a simple Windows app to download and install the latest nightly build of Mozilla or Phoenix with just a few button clicks, check out MozUpdate.
In the README there is the following:
Although I really don't find Mozilla to be all that bloated and slow. It's my main browser of choice on OS X, Win NT, and Debian.MOJIRA ROARS!
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
A small snippet from the FAQ: Phoenix FAQ
I am replying to this post in Phoenix 0.2 running on Windows 2000.
SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST ON A MOTORCYCLE TALKING ON A MOBILE PHONE!@$ This thing is fast as hell.
I'm really glad it did not go the way of Mozilla interface, which looks like Netscape. Part of the Mozilla trouble is just that. People presume it's the "old" netscape and are reluctant to keep it on their systems.
Furthermore, I love it how Phoenix does not integrate into your OS like a multi-headed hydra. Tabbed browsing is a plus. Still achievable with netcaptor on IE 5.x/6.x but not a native application.
This will be the browser I will use on Win2k when they figure out how to dock the google toolbar on it.
Also, many windows users confuse the IE loadtime with page render time. It's a common misconseption. I am sold on Phoenix.
A shell script which does the same thing.
Once Mozilla & Phoenix are started and running side by side I don't see much difference. Phoenix is somewhat faster but I appreciate the richness of Mozilla, which does my mail/news/browsing from a single app.
There's room in the world for both of course, and Phoenix might find a use in situations where people don't need a mail/news client or some of the more complex features in Mozilla.
a Phoenix is a mythical bird that's made of fire.
People sometimes just ignore the facts. You learn to deal with it.
Add to that already-beautiful list of "mozilla is sweeter" features:
Portability - I can use the same browser on my linux box at home as I can in the windows labs at my university - which is great, IMO.
Mozilla Composer/Mail/Add-ons - free stuff that people forget are included with the full install - you shouldn't ignore those nice freebies.
There are several other "cool" things I like about Moz, like zoom ( ctrl + ), image blocking by server, etc. - but I don't know if IE implements these as well.
Moz isn't perfect, no. But it is my favorite. Phoenix is pretty sweet though - it may steal my browsing crown soon.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Unfortuneatly, it [the "linked images" bookmarklet] chokes on donkey balls on sites that check referrer headers before serving images.
Not anymore -- bbaetz, darin, and I fixed bug 123293 in August. If you find any specific sites or command sequences (such as "linked images" followed by View Image followed by Shift+Reload) that fail to send the referrer header in 1.2alpha or later, please file a bug and cc me.
The shareholder is always right.
If you'd like a Googlebar in Mozilla, try googlebar @ mozdev.org. I haven't personally used it, but it seems to be what you're looking for.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I checked mozdev-googlebar. So far it doesn't seem to say anything about phoenix - but by the time they hit another milestone or three perhaps the googlebar will work on both mozilla and phoenix. Try submitting it as a request...
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Create an ActiveX gecko to use instead of MSHTML.DLL
As you said, the IE engine is an ActiveX control. Here's a Gecko ActiveX control, and it even comes with a program that patches programs that embed IE so that they embed Gecko instead.
But ActiveX will get you nowhere on the other (non-Windows) platforms tnat Moz supports. Therefore, an ActiveX based Gecko browser for Windows should really be a separate project.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've been using .2, and .1 before it. Pretty nice, and much more stable on Win2k than Mozilla is (not sure WHY, but it is).
The only things I dislike:
1. I hate the drop down in the url bar when I'm entering a site. The ability to disable that would be awesome.
2. I also dislike entering text in the url bar, and prefered hitting ctrl-shift-L to open the location window to type it in there (don't ask why, it's just habit).
3. Have an option to disable the download manager. If you're using Phoenix, you should be competent enough to download without training wheels.
4. That'll make it perfect.
IE is a good browser, but as a web developer for web development, shame on you for not using Mozilla. :)
Jason.
Currently the Phoenix package still contains all/most of the Mozilla code that is being replaced. Therefore the size is ~25MB as you said. But when they finally remove all the cruft it should be about 8MB or so.
Also, same speed as Galeon, but still using interpreted(?) XUL. I think they've done great things there. And it's only 0.2!
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Go into your Phoenix or Mozilla directory.
Edit the file defaults/pref/unix.js at about line 230.
Change
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", false);
to
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
And there you go!.
You probably should also tinker with font.antialias.min,
font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.min and font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain until the fonts look good to you.
That would be Bug 78104:
[RFE] Pattern-matching based (url-based) image blocking
Phillip
Looks like it's actually libstdc++ that needs to be up-to-the-millisecond. Considering the still-ever-changing nature of GCC's APIs (see here, here, and here, would it kill folks to either statically link the libstdc++ they use for binary releases, or at least include the apropriate .so file, like Phoenix does for all the Mozilla libs? (libxpcom, etc...) Just a suggestion. Otherwise I'd probably be typing this in Phoenix instead of Opera right now...
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
Chimera doesn't kill popup windows.
Oh Yes it does! Early versions didn't give you a selection for it, but if you knew how to edit the prefs files you could enable it. Other versions turned it on for you the first time a popup occurred (after asking politely). Latest has that and a preference checkbox for it.
As for image blocking, not yet, but probably soon I'd guess.
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.