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Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
David Tansey writes "The Mozilla-based stripped down browser has now reached binary release 0.3. They are ripping out all the mail and news functions, composer functions, and IRC functions. The point is to work against the 'monolitic' mozilla trunk and make a browser, not a suite. I've noticed that it now uses considerably less memory than Mozilla uses and loads faster. Check it out here."
I don't know. Personally I've never had a problem with Mozilla's load or rendering speed. I mean it could be a smaller install, but I haven't bothered with Phoenix as a seperate, if admittedly smaller installer, doesn't seem worth the hassle Ray
I can see why many people would prefer to get Mozilla's browser apart from all the other junk. But the fact is, I *like* the email client, and web page composer. So I'll keep using the full Mozilla release.
On the other hand, the IRC client could disappear for all I care, and if dumping it would lose some of the bloat, I'd be all for it. Maybe the Mozilla dev team should consider making their product more modular, so components can be excluded.
Finally something that I can run on my Tuxscreen telephone. Great job guys!
BroadbandPig
And it's "only" a 10Mbyte download. However, I have to say, it does seem more responsive than Mozilla.
The K-Meleon browser for Windows is a Gecko-based browser that uses native Windows widgets and GUI elements.
It has not seen an official update in almost a year, however there has been a quietly released (as in, not even mentioned on the front page) beta build, which you can grab here.
It adds new things, including support for 'layers, which is basically the name they've given to tabs.
If you're interested with trying new browser and use Windows, you may want to give it a look.
-- Anonymous Hero
You know what's ironic - that's the way Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together. Then you've got Mozilla chugging around. I used Phoenix and I love it - its really fast and seems stable. Good work guys.
$45 per U Colocation Special
The core group is not working on IRC Chat or Composer (except insofar as textareas need to work). IRC Chat was initially done by one person and is now maintained by three people or so.
That's how open source software works. Someone wanted an IRC client? They wrote one. If that's what they want to spend their time on, who's to stop them?
. . . and I love it. It's great. I've tried similar projects before -- K-Meleon under Windows, Galeon under Linux -- and neither of them worked as well for me as Phoenix. Besides, K-Meleon's development seems to have stalled, and Galeon requires about a zillion different gnome things before it'll compile, not to mention the whole Mozilla codebase as well.
The ability to customize the interface *easily* is killer. I like having my Home button on the main toolbar, thank you, and getting it there in Mozilla is a serious pain, and requires 1) substituting a whole new theme, or 2) doing some XUL hacking. With Phoenix, you right click, select "Customize," and then you can drag and drop toolbar elements from the available selection. Absolutely terrific.
Oh! And the plugin installation stuff WORKS now. I never could get Java to work in Mozilla without manually copying files around (under windows) or making symlinks (under linux). With Phoenix, it just downloaded, installed itself, and started working. No user intervention required.
That said, it's not perfect. First off, there are a lot of features enabled by default that you can't disable because the preferences menu has been gutted. For example, I prefer to turn off the Password Manager . . . but I can't, unless I feel like opening up the preferences.js file and altering the preferences settings manually. Hopefully this will be remedied in later versions; on general principles, you should retain preferences settings for each feature.
I'm having a hard time coming up with other objections to it. But I'm sure I'll find some. And then I'll submit bugs to Bugzilla. Go you all and do likewise!
And as a side note, at least on Windows, Mozilla has been just as fast as IE for ages now. Using QuickStart makes startup instant, although here at work I never bothered switching it on as it starts quickly enough for me anyway.
On *what* Windows I ask? As I always do, as I've used Mozilla for quite some time (exclusively for mail, together with others for browsing), on several boxes, and never seen this happen.
Face it people, Mozilla can never be as fast as IE, partly because IE cheats, and partly because, well the Mozilla UI is slow-rendered. The latter could probably be "fixed", but probably not as long as the otherwise great XUL is used - the win is extremely flexible GUI instead. I tend to think that it is worth the slower UI. But don't say it is as fast as heavily optimized win32 GUI. Duh.
It also gets swapped out long time before memory is full, and boy has it got trouble getting back out of there... is this more Windows cheating? It might be. Don't know. It doesn't hang though... just goes for a very long walk before it comes back.
QuickStart helps. Not more, not less. It helps. No instant starts there, even on my AMD XP 1800 with 512 MB meory and nothing else running, IE beats it easily. IE beats it easily on every machine I've tried, ranging from 300 Mhz to around 1500 Mhz, with memory varying from 128-512 MB most oftenly.
So what is this magic machine that makes Mozilla as fast as IE? What Windows? Oh, maybe it is 3.1 on an old 386? That would probably make it hard to tell the difference...
Now, instead of running around pretending as if our favourite browser is already as fast and as good as the competition, how about we open our eyes and make that happen for real instead?
Maybe that would make "normal" people take us seriously, for starters. They don't when they clearly see the lies.
I have been running this browser since I first heard of it, when Slashdot announced 0.1's release. Since then, I have been avidly using it alongside Moz nightlies and Opera 6.05. Put succinctly, Phoenix rocks. It's Mozilla minus a lot of the lard.
Reasons why I like it:
Also try some of Phoenix's extensions. Highly recommended for tab lovers are the tabbed browsing extensions - so handy and sensible it should be part of the default install.
Now go to the website, get it and have fun - I know you will
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Wouldnt it be better if instead of stripping these things, they would make them availale as modules. While installation, the user can disable the modules he dosent want. So you have speed and ppl who want mail and news have that too.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
OK. If one does that, what happens when one clicks on a mailto: link? Can it be configured to start one's favorite mailer?
This feature is already in Mozilla. I believe I have used it at least from 1.0.
Reality or nothing.
Hmm, I'm tracking unstable, and keep periodicly trying apt-get install phoenix, but it still aint there. Is anyone working on this one? Of course, I am perfectly happy with galeon (I will never need to touch mozilla again. Yay!), but is perhaps phoenix even smaller?
I'm posting this with Mozilla 1.2a from 200 MHz Pentium II with 64Mb ram and Windows 98. Mozilla is so fast that additional benefits would not help. It may or may not be faster than MSIE, both react subjectively "immidately", so I don't really care. I do have QuickLaunch enabled, but since I only start Mozilla once (after boot) anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Of course, swapping between large applications is slow, but apart from the browser the only applications I run is an X server and some ssh connections (it is basically an X terminal), and apparently they all fit within the 64Mb, so for normal use it is fine.
But I don't call you a liar for stating that Mozilla feels slow to you. You may have another usage pattern where MSIE feel faster.
I'm using Phoenix 0.3 on Windows right now. Never touched any settings.
:-) But how does it not allow you to login? It gave me a friendly "please re-enter your password" when I typed in some bogus info. Does it do that for you, or does something else happen?
- Airmiles loads just fine, including front page. I browsed the site and everything looked to be in order.
- Don't know about Hotmail since I don't have a Hotmail account. Go figure...
- You should tell IGN to see what's the problem with Mozilla-based browsers. Sounds like it wouldn't need a tremendous amount of effort to fix.
- I don't know the procedure, but you should send your employers self serve site to the Mozilla team (try posting it to an appropriate mozilla newsgroup on Google Groups for example - I think they have a public news server at news.mozilla.org as well) so they can look into it. Since the source view shows its almost entirely made of Javascript code, it wouldn't be surprising if they program IE-style with document.all and god knows what. But it could be something else like a bug in Mozilla's rendering engine. Why not notify them to help?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Check this out:
n bsp; 1 user users 10328269 Oct 3 14:16 phoenix-0.2-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gzn bsp; 1 user users 9520231 Oct 15 18:32 phoenix-0.3-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 10850305 Sep 24 17:41 phoenix-0.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--&
-rw-------&
Phoenix is becoming smaller (and faster) which each release!
And they had better be optimising for speed!
I downloaded it straight away to have a look and apart from not rendering tables the same way as IE (something to do with pixel positioning and sizing - probly my fault) I notices it is not that fast.
A brief comparison of a little demo I did (www.freshbrains.co.uk) - this is a bunch of simple transparent sprites boinging around) shows that IE6 is about 2 to 2.5 times faster than Phoenix (which I assmue is the Gecko core).
Still a way to go! But yer gettin there!
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
If you do a custom install of Mozilla instead of typical or everything, you can deselect everything except "Navigator".
Even then it is too big of a footprint/resource hog (IMO), but at least you don't have the extras you speak of.
In your user CSS file:Repeat for all common advert sizes you see.
Alternatively, use mine. Goes for Opera users too, although it will still load the banners; it just won't display them.