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."

Comments

Is it worth it?

[NightRain]

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

But I *like* those functions...

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

K-Meleon

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Using it right now

[Selanit]

. . . 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!

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[Dog and Pony]

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.

My thoughts on Phoenix 0.3

[Compact Dick]

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:

• Speed: Phoenix loads in around 2-5 secs on my PII 366M w/128 MB RAM. Mozilla takes a leisurely 20-30 seconds. Hmmm...
• Standards compliance: Since Phoenix has the same Gecko rendering engine from Moz, I am assured that it renders properly-coded sites very well [extensive support for CSS2 and DOM helps here]. This vastly improves rendering times [more on that later]. Lesser sites still come out quite proper with its Quirks rendering mode.
• Rendering speed: It may not be evident to Moz users on slower machines, but Gecko can be blazingly fast given the right environment. Phoenix is fscking fast. Just as fast as IE, if not faster. Only Opera can claim to do one better, especially loading pages from cache. Opera is truly King in this arena.
• Excellent XUL implementation: Phoenix has shown that XUL can be a viable alternative to using native widgets. Try it for yourself - it's much more responsive and fluid. And the customisable toolbar is a real treat. Worth downloading it for that feature alone. Hopefully Mozilla will pick up a few pointers here and merge them into its own codebase.
• Satchel: a replacement for Moz's form manager, it works in a manner similar to IE, which IMO is more usable. Plus, Satchel is intended as a full replacement for the older, "bloated" form manager and eventually will cut down installer size and boost speed. One more boon for Mozilla.
• Peace of mind: I refuse to use IE online for reasons of privacy. I do not know what it does with the info it gathers while one uses it. I have no idea if there are backdoors in it. Ad-aware detects at least one spyware component [Alexa] in default installs of IE 5.x and 6.0. The recent Sendmail and OpenSS? exploits notwithstanding, I feel much more comfortable using an open-source program when connected to the net.

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 :-)

Re:Here's why I won't use it

[Jugalator]

I'm using Phoenix 0.3 on Windows right now. Never touched any settings.

- 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... :-) 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?

- 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?