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

moderate

[10 Speed]

if only I could moderate the guys doing this...a browser that only browses, small, lean and fast. Such a great idea...(+5 sensible)

Re:moderate

[rseuhs]

Check this out:

-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 10850305 Sep 24 17:41 phoenix-0.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--&n bsp; 1 user users 10328269 Oct 3 14:16 phoenix-0.2-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-------&n bsp; 1 user users 9520231 Oct 15 18:32 phoenix-0.3-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Phoenix is becoming smaller (and faster) which each release!

Soon there will be nothing left

[StefMeister]

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.

If they continue like this, there will be nothing left by 0.5 :)

Re:Soon there will be nothing left

[Sn4xx0r]

They are ripping out all the mail and news functions, composer functions, and IRC functions.

There's a bit more to it then that. They are also recoding a lot of the browser interface, for speed enhancement, but also to bring new functionality. Configurable toolbars, for one. A pop-up blocking whitelist, opposed to blocking pop-ups from every site in Mozilla. An extensions manager, just click to install the extension you like (mousegestures, prefbar...no uninstall yet). It's a browser worth watching, IMHO.

Re:Soon there will be nothing left

[A Rabid Tibetan Yak]

(mousegestures, prefbar...no uninstall yet)

I'm posting from Phoenix 0.3 now. Check the release notes before posting -- Extension Uninstall is included in this new version. To find it, Tools->Preferences->Themes and Extensions, click on the "Extensions" tab and you can disable or uninstall your extensions quite happily.

Overall it's a great browser, it really shows off what Mozilla can do. I'm recommending it to friends, it can tempt them with all the speed of IE, the features of Mozilla, and the bloat of neither :).

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

Re:Is it worth it?

[NightRain]

Yeah, fair enough, I'm not the target audience. But my point is it doesn't render any faster that I've been able to see, and only really has a noticeable difference in load times. But you load the browser once, and that's it. I don't see the issue over a couple of seconds. So what IS the selling point? I mean 90% of the people that use it will have Mozilla installed anyway, so it doesn't save download bandwidth or the like. I guess I just don't see why it's compelling enough to bother with. If I'm missing something obvious, I welcome the correction.

Ray

Re:Is it worth it?

[vidarh]

With those memory amounts, it sounds to me like you're quoting the number of virtual pages allocated for the processes... Notice that that includes things like shared libraries that are used across processes, and also a lot of stuff that never will get paged into RAM unless you actually use it. So a lot of the size difference between Mozilla and Phoenix will simply be shared libraries that aren't mapped in, but that you'd never load in Mozilla either unless you actually use one of the features that have been stripped out.

I still like Phoenix, and it does save memory, but make sure you look at the resident set, not virtual pages allocated when you want to judge actual memory usage.

Re:Is it worth it?

[colinramsay]

It's main selling point for me is that it's a lot more streamlined... smaller install, smaller memory footprint, faster loading and window opening. Plus they've removed everything that I never use- composer, etc. It's simple and so it's beautiful :)

Re:Is it worth it?

[Lozzer]

Mozilla is multi threaded, some linux system monitoring tools don't grok multi threaded so it appears that you get number of active threads x process memory allocated. That said the ratio is probably right, althought the actual memory usage is probably a fifth or a sixth of the value quoted. Then again, maybe you have some huge plugins.

Re:Is it worth it?

[wheany]

only really has a noticeable difference in load times.

Exactly! I don't want an email program, a news reader, an HTML editor, a chat program or an IM client with my browser. I use separate programs for those. If they can be plugged in to the browser, good. But I don't want a "forced" install of programs I never use.

Re:Is it worth it?

[Negatyfus]

Forced? You can choose not to install most of those programs with the Mozilla installer. Doesn't make Mozilla much leaner, but still. On a fast computer it's not even luggish.

Re:Is it worth it?

[rseuhs]

Yeah, I was also quite happy with Mozilla. But I wanted configurable toolbars, so I tried Phoenix.

But they are both great browsers, it's just preference.

Re:Is it worth it?

[GooberToo]

Mozilla is a huge memory pig. When I unload it I typicaly see anywhere from 40M - 120M of my memory being returned to the system. AFAIK, Mozilla has some serious memory leaks or has the absolutely worse possible cache implementation anyone could create. If the problem isn't either of those two, Mozilla has some serious core problems.

Anything that can be done to address the memory foot print is a HUGE win for Mozilla.

Re:Is it worth it?

[90XDoubleSide]

Actually the Mac OS X version does force you to install all of the programs.

Interaction, not Merging

[e8johan]

Great work! I think that this is the direction to move - lots of small(?) apps, one for each purpose. What is needed is a smart way of letting applications interact (DCOP anyone?), instead of merging them into huge projects.

This was actually the original UNIX philosopy, lots of small tools interacting to achieve something complex. Let us bring this idea to the desktop and create the most flexible, powerful, easy-to-use desktop ever seen.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[nemesisj]

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.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[IamTheRealMike]

This was actually the original UNIX philosopy, lots of small tools interacting to achieve something complex. Let us bring this idea to the desktop and create the most flexible, powerful, easy-to-use desktop ever seen.

And is still continued today ... the difference? The components are no longer split along process lines and don't communicate using pipes and stdin/stdout. They use the fantastically more powerful mechanisms of XPCOM/CORBA etc.

I've seen this a lot. Out comes a new GNOME/KDE release, people moan and say "What happened to the unix philosophy of small tools?" They are alive and kicking, but those tools have now transcended the arbitrary limitations of text streams.

I've even seen this in reference to Emacs! People kick Emacs for its bloat, but at least if you get XEmacs everything is modular and packaged. You just pick the functionality you want right off. It's all componentized along lisp functions.

Why do people think modularity stops at the command line? It's alive and well, especially in Linux which has to be the most modular OS in history.

It should be noted that DCOP is hardly an advanced rpc protocol. In particular, it's tied to Qt, and is text based (iirc). Something like CORBA is better, but unfortunately is much harder to setup and understand. Hopefully some day somebody will build an object model that doesn't suck.

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. Pheonix is worth more as a test bed for experimental UI design that a "light" browser, as it'll end up becoming heavy as time goes on anyway.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[stilborne]

dcop is not tied to Qt. there is a C implementation of dcop that has nary a trace of Qt in it distributed with kdelibs.

and while you are correct that DCOP is fairly simple and less featureful than something like CORBA (which, given the context for DCOP isn't necessarily a bad thing), it can and does send/recv binary data

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.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[richie2000]

The Microsoft approach you mention is a bit misleading - all of those apps use the same basic functionality that's built into the OS kernel - one large, stinking glob of code. What you percieve as different apps is little more than different front-ends for the API/DLL-hell that's Windows. But, they still need each other - try to uninstall OE but keep IE and Messenger. Or completely replace OE with the full Outbreak from Office. The dependencies are just hidden from plain view.

That said, I think Mozilla does leave too big a footprint. I remember back in the Good Old Days you could get Netscape Navigator and Communicator as separate packages. I'd actually like a lean Mozilla browser and a separate Mozilla mail app. No webpage creation, no messenger, no chat/irc. I'll definitely keep an eye on Phoenix.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[gazbo]

all of those apps use the same basic functionality that's built into the OS kernel - one large, stinking glob of code.

Would that be the Windows NT microkernel?

Yeah, it is horribly bloated. Imagine how bloated and crap an OS with a (by definition) much larger monolithic kernel would be.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[richie2000]

Because I have a zillion e-mail messages neatly stored in Mozilla Mail right now and it's no point in switching browser if I still run a mailer with a browser attached. :-)

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[BurritoWarrior]

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.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[Ctrl-Z]

For mail purposes, there is the Thunderbird (formerly known as Minotaur) project. According to mozilla.org, it is expected around the time of Phoenix 0.5.

As a Mozilla Mail user (on Windows), I personally can't wait to give it a try.

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.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[e8johan]

Why not having all those functions in separate applications that can be automatically embedded into Mozilla if wanted/needed and otherwise leave them out.

I'd say that all this integration makes we want to go back to text mode only. Apps should have one purpose (for example browsing) otherwise they end up being bloated gigants.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[Longinus]

Minotaur is being developed as a Phoenix-style replacement for Mozilla Mail and News, except with the same UI as Mozilla. Eventually, Thunderbird will be developed from Minotaur, only with a Phoenix based UI.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[ProfessorPuke]

Have you tried Phoenix? It seems that you're not quite sure what it is. I use Debian, and it's mozilla packages are broken up into separate mozilla-browser and mozilla-mailnews components that can be installed independently.

Yet, I'm running Phoenix right now (after it was introduced to /. last week). Its much more (less?) than the mozilla browser by itself. I'm not clear on the technical details (it runs too well for me to need to dig into it), but they've apparently sacrified flexibility and over-abundant options for speed/compactness. There's no preference option to install new GUI themes, for instance, so possibly lots of XUL stuff has been simplified/eliminated. Also things like download manager & password manager have been removed, at least for now.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[Graymalkin]

You'd have more of a point if Mozilla wasn't already a huge framework of code. The parts of the Mozilla that make it a browser, mail client, or IRC client are very small compared to the rest of the Mozilla system. If you want just a browser load up Opera or Athena. Complaining about Mozilla being bloated is silly. It is an entire application framework, not merely a web browser app with a mail client.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape jumped on the suite bandwagon; now that that fad is over, why can't they get off?

Netscape INVENTED the suite bandwagon, which is why they couldn't get themselves off it for Mozilla.

Microsoft never had the audacity to think that Outlook Express had to run in the same process space as IE anyway, and neither did anyone else. But for some bogo-strategic reason, Netscape just had to cram it all into one big process and ignore your system-wide URL handler prefs. Having 1 borked page take down all 9 other browser windows AND your mail wasn't too bright, and lots of folks said so early on (here and elsewhere).

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[spongman]

funnily enough OE was originally written as a shell extension designed to be embedded into the explorer namespace (under My Computer somewhere), but I don't think that idea ever made it beyond the developers' machines.

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[William Tanksley]

Read the Phoenix documentation -- the whole goal is to produce a modular Mozilla with a rationally designed user interface.

The thing's built around the concept of plugins.

-Billy

good idea and

[i_luv_linux]

Getting rid of unrelated stuff may help, but I believe they should also get rid of that skinnable interface thing. It just makes everything slower. I don't think that people give any importance to skins on their browsers. It is certainly not a plus at all, but it is a negative because it makes the browser a little bit more unresponsive because it redraws every detail there.

Re:good idea and

[TheAJofOZ]

Agreed, wholeheartedly. I got into a discussion/argument with a Mozilla developer over the benefits of native widgits, versus rolling your own when OpenOffice first came out (it started as a discussion on whether OpenOffice should use native widgets or not).

My prediction then was that Mozilla would have no chance on Mac OS if it didn't use native widgets nor would it be looked upon too kindly by Windows users. I was right. Chimera (Mozilla using native widgets) is about as popular as Mozilla on OS X and it's only at 0.5.

Developers, pay heed! You must use native widgets or you are doomed to look bad everywhere! You can't just create a skin and expect it to look and feel right.

Oh and yes, I agree WinAMP should be shot for starting that craze (though otherwise it's not a bad MP3 player).

Re:good idea and

[TheAJofOZ]

And yet Apple does just that. Quicktime, iCal, iChat, iTunes.. all Brushed Steel, not Aqua. IE 5.5 on the Mac sure as hell doesn't use native widgets either.

Erm, actually, they all use native widgets. You can make your app look like that too just by checking a box in interface builder.

Microsoft does it too.. MS Office and WMP don't use the standard Win32 widgets.

There are millions of Office users out there that say Office looks good and definately "feels right".

Two flaws with this - 1. MS make the OS, so any widget they care to make is effectively native, even if it's not available to other applications. 2. Office for at least the great majority of things does use native widgets, there may be a few things that are custom built but certainly not everything.

And where do you get that? Everyone I've talked to says Chimera is very obviously beta software... no polish. You haven't any stats that show Chimera is even half as popular as Mozilla on OSX?

Everyone I've talked to says that Chimera is very good, though still not feature complete. You may wish to check the front page of www.macosxhints.com today for just one such comment.

Re:good idea and

[Planesdragon]

Office for at least the great majority of things does use native widgets, there may be a few things that are custom built but certainly not everything.

No?

* Open / Save dialogue
* Find dialogue (part of "open.)
* Toolbars
* Menu bars

How again does it use native widgets?

Finally!

[Erazmus]

Finally something that I can run on my Tuxscreen telephone. Great job guys!

wow

[g4dget]

And it's "only" a 10Mbyte download. However, I have to say, it does seem more responsive than Mozilla.

Re:wow

[bogie]

Actually its 7.0MB on windows and 9.1MB on Linux.

The size will also be getting smaller as time goes on and they rip out more of the uneeded stuff.

Phoenix is cool and all...

[Longinus]

...but I hardly think we need to a new story notifying us of every new release (especially in these early alpha stages of binary only stuff). This is the forth Phoenix story (1, 2, 3, including a repeat) since its release, so how about we give it a break until a big milestone is hit?

Re:Phoenix is cool and all...

[Jugalator]

- Phoenix is neither in alpha, nor beta stages AFAIK. Note it just says "Phoenix 0.3". I could be wrong here though if I missed anything saying it was alpha/beta.

- Phoenix doesn't follow the Microsoft/AOL-style version inflation. If it would, we would have version 3.0 final by now. Bug fixing and polish will start in the next version. See also the roadmap.

Heathens!

[Anthony Boyd]

The point is to work against the 'monolitic' mozilla trunk and make a browser, not a suite.

My God. You mean they want to make an app that does one job only, and does it well? But that's so... so... Unix! I thought we were supposed to be making everything the same as Windows. I mean, IE has chat and email and... oh, wait. Nevermind.

Re:Heathens!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anthony, stop reading Slashdot and hire someone for that PHP position already. ;)

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

Monolith

[yellowcord]

Whats up with the monolithic Mozilla anyway? My understanding is that the UNIX philosophy is/was supposed to be to design programs to do one thing well. Admittedly Mozilla (Netscape) is aimed primarily at windows users but why is it that Mozilla has all that crap? Mail (and Address book) I can understand, but Composer and IRC Chat? Come on now. Why don't the core group work on a stand alone browser instead of having to wait for Galeon and Phoenix to catch up?

Re:Monolith

[BZ]

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?

Re:Monolith

[IamTheRealMike]

Will people please stop bitching about this? If you don't want mail/irc/composer installed then use the net installer and uncheck the boxes. Moz is very componentized, and it will not install them. Don't expect huge reductions in download time or massive increases in speed however - all that stuff is load on demand anyway, so it only slows down your machine when you actually use them.

Re:Monolith

[jejones]

OK. If one does that, what happens when one clicks on a mailto: link? Can it be configured to start one's favorite mailer?

Re:Low verse High systems...

[Toraz Chryx]

turn off Mozillas Quicklaunch memory resident stuff, then start them both (sequentially).

Phoenix starts as fast as IE does, click *beat* open browser window (and IE is (mostly?) memory resident)

on this AthlonXP @ 1.6Ghz with a gig of ram and a WD1200JB (WinXP SP1), Mozilla OTOH takes like 8 seconds from click to browsable window unless quicklaunch is running.

block images from this server

[roalt]

By right-clicking on an image, you can select "block images from this server" and further images will not be loaded from this site, saving you annoying advertisements and download-times.

I managed to replace the slashdot advertisements inside a story with blank space, but removing the top-banner page will also remove all your other slashdot graphics. Maybe phoenix can include a feature that blocks images from a URL containing the text "adlog.pl" ?

Re:block images from this server

[horza]

By right-clicking on an image, you can select "block images from this server" and further images will not be loaded from this site, saving you annoying advertisements and download-times.

I would love to be able to try out this feature, unfortunately using Privoxy I've not been able to see any banner ads to block. Also blocks the banner ad at the top of /. without removing all the other graphics. Deals with tracking cookies for you too. Highly recommended.

Phillip.

Re:block images from this server

[Lars Arvestad]

By right-clicking on an image, you can select "block images from this server" and further images will not be loaded from this site, saving you annoying advertisements and download-times.

This feature is already in Mozilla. I believe I have used it at least from 1.0.

Re:block images from this server

[Dr. Spork]

This is a Mozilla feature too, and a very nice one. It's also reversible--you can also UNblock images from this server by clicking on the blank space where an image should be. More clever sites like this one and NYT run all their ads from their general graphics server, but most websites still don't. This is an awesome feature. If you use this in conjunction with the plugin that blocks images of specific "banner ad" sizes, you get some pretty clean propaganda protection. I like this much better than setting an ad-filtering proxy becuse the people who run the proxy know exactly who you request packets from. Who knows where this info will end up?

Re:block images from this server

[Fweeky]

I managed to replace the slashdot advertisements inside a story with blank space, but removing the top-banner page will also remove all your other slashdot graphics. Maybe phoenix can include a feature that blocks images from a URL containing the text "adlog.pl" ?

In your user CSS file:

a img[width="468"][height="60"] {
display: none;
}

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.

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!

Phoenix / Thunderbird (Minotaur)

[denisb]

Just to clarify the confusion with the projects:

Thunderbird is the new name of the Minotaur project. Unlike what some said, they are thus one, and will fill the same function as Phoenix for the mail part.

Eventually we will have two very capable clients, Phoenix for browsing, and Thunderbird for Mail. This will make advocacy easier too, some people complain they cannot run Mozilla on their older Windoze boxen. Well they can run Phoenix and Thunderbird ! I measured Phoenix memory usage compared to Mozilla and Opera (all with about 6-7 tabs open, the same URLs in all three), and Phoenix was really close to Opera, about 10M less than Mozilla.. YMMV of course with different pages etc, but it is slimmer indeed.

Re:Opera or Phoenix?

['The '.$L3mm1ng]

From a webdesigner point of view: *please* use Phoenix or any other Gecko based browser. Opera is a nightmare for webdesigners. Especially when using *gasp* DHTML, which can actually be useful.

The next big Opera release may change this, since it will be a complete rewrite with better DOM support in mind. But as of now, Opera sux in this regard.

Not really that much memory gain

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice and fast OK, but tried to open a few pages (one at a time) under NT4.0 and look at memory in task manager - it was the same for both Mozilla and Phoenix: 32-34MB. Still not good for our old p-100 w95 machines with 16mb ram.

Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors

[RPoet]

I'm was pulling down a whoppering 1.0kb/sec from ftp.mozilla.org, thanks to slashdot linking directly to the master server. PLEASE use a mirror, there's a full list of them here. Not all mirrors carry phoenix, and some that do don't have 0.3, but at least this one does (and probably others too).

Re:Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors

[pointwood]

You want everyone else to use the mirrors and at the same time, you're downloading from ftp.mozilla.org? Nice ;)

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 :-)

another approach?

[tanveer1979]

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.

Phoenix: FAQ, tips&tricks and keyboard shortcu

[Sn4xx0r]

Here's a help site dedicated to Phoenix, created by David Tenser. Announced in this thread on MozillaZine, and see also the Phoenix forums.

Debian?

[tconnors]

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?

Here's why I won't use it

[roc_machine]

I'll probably get called an IE Zealot and modded down for this...

I've ran Phoenix 0.2, and I really tried to like it. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker, custimized toolbar, and it doesn't have the bloatedness of Moz. Stable too for a 0.2 release. BUT...

IT DOESN'T RENDER THE PAGES I WANT TO VIEW PROPERLY! I ran into the same problem with Netscape 7 and Moz 1.

Sites that I couldn't load properly in Phoenix:

Airmiles.ca
- Couldn't load the front page.
Hotmail
- Loaded front page but couldn't log in.
IGN Cube
- This goes for all IGN game sites... the articles that are locked for subscribers have an 'i' beside them. This does not show up in Phoenix.
My Employers Self Serve site
- I can log in but the page hangs on the welcome screen.

I only have about 15 sites bookmarked, and the above 4 don't work. Who knows how many other sites are out there.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe I have to configure something (If so, let me know please!), but the bottom line is that these sites load fine in IE.

I don't want to hear people say "These websites aren't following a standard". Tell me something I don't know.

I want a browser that lets me view the pages I want to see, thankyouverymuch. Until there's an alternative that does this, I'm sticking with IE along with its swiss cheese security.

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?

What lies?

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Results of my brief comparisons

[purrpurrpussy]

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!

Bad news!

[varslot]

A conservative linear prediction based on your data for size versus version number shows that Phoenix will disappear somewhere between version 1.7 and 1.8. However, as the data seems to follow a quadratic curve rather than a linear one, the disappearance is likely to happen a lot sooner.

Re:Bad news!

[Jugalator]

... as in 1.0? That would be a great way to celebrate the world's smallest browser!

"The Phoenix Team is proud to announce that we have finally shrunk the browser to the ultimate size: 0 bytes. Thanks to everyone supporting us in our quest to develop the smallest browser on earth."

Less memory?

[Bazman]

How can I tell if it is using less memory? If I start up a phoenix-0.3 and a mozilla I see the following:

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 29153 0.0 7.5 34168 19372 pts/8 S 13:56 0:00 ./phoenix-bin
root 29174 0.0 8.0 33988 20656 pts/8 S 13:57 0:00 /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla-bin

That's not much of a difference in memory size. I'm only using the mozilla browser and not the mail component.

Clue me please.

Bazman

(actually I see about six of each of those but I assume thats threads-as-processes for you)

What's with the binary-only releases?

[AugstWest]

No source? I wanted to compile it for OSX, but I can't seem to find any sourcee.

Re:What's with the binary-only releases?

[forsetti]

From the release notes:

12. Okay, so where's the phoenix source?

cvs.mozilla.org. Mozilla trunk + mozilla/browser + mozilla/toolkit.

Re:Usability Problems

[thesolo]

This seems like a troll, but I'll bite.

I like my browser to mesh with my operating system. Not so far to where the OS doesn't let you uninstall it, but to where it blends in with the look of my OS. I use Windows XP, and Mozilla does not look like XP. Sure the GUI is nice, but it looks odd with my Luna style. In addition, IE meshes with Explorer. So I can easily switch between Explorer and Internet explorer. Try typing "C:\Program Files" in Mozilla/Phoenix. Very different.

Phoenix DOES mesh with the OS; Go ahead, change your colors in Windows, Phoenix picks them up. If you are complaining that the iconset for Phoenix doesn't look like the default icons for Windows, well, neither do the icons in IE6! As for meshing with Explorer, oh well; I personally DON'T want a browser integrating with my shell, I want JUST a browser. How many IE security holes resulted from that shell integration??

In addition, there are many usability issues. Click on the address bar, while it's highlighted, click, hold and drag towards the left or right. It attempts to drag the entire address, maybe to drag and drop in the bookmarks menu. Now try it in IE, it's different. It will highlight the portion and allow you to edit it etc. That is very annoying in Phoenix/Mozilla.

This is NOT a usability issue. If you highlight a section of text in IE, then try to click, hold, and drag, you CAN'T DO IT. I just tried even to verify this; as soon as you click on the highlighted text, it removes the highlight and starts editing text. Personally, I don't like this behavior, as it prevents me from dragging URLs. If you just want to edit text, then don't try clicking & dragging! That sounds like much more of a user problem than a software problem.

Another usability problem is the placement of the Address bar. Why is it at the same layer as the toolbar? (Back, Forward buttons). I believe there is a Bug reported in BugZilla about this in Mozilla, but of course... nobody cares about Usability issues.

So right-click on the toolbar and select "customize...", then place it where ever you want it. Have you even *tried* Phoenix??
As for Mozilla, blame Netscape, their graphic designers wanted it that way, which is why, despite having been patched, it hasn't made its way into the Moz trunk. That particular bug doesn't even have an owner right now!!

Why can't I have "Selective Text on Right". And that "Toolbar Customizer" with the drag and drop has bad usability problems. It's very confusing to use. And having to "Name" your toolbars?? Err..

Selective Text on Right is actually very bad for usability, but if you want it, file a bug and see what the Phoenix developers say.
As for the toolbar customizer, how do you figure that it has usability problems? It works the same as almost any other toolbar customizer; you move what you want onto the toolbar! The whole point of the Phoenix customization is to have the customizing happen LIVE, as opposed to making a queued list, and then applying your settings. This is a GOOD usability practice.
Lastly, you name a toolbar when you create a new one so that you can turn the toolbar on and off! The new toolbar appears by name in the Toolbar list. I personally create a new bar called "Address Bar", then drag the address text field onto it. Go to View, then Toolbars, and there it is! Now you can create toolbars and turn them off and on as you wish. Again, this is GOOD UI practice.

Also, the Bookmark Management is very sloppy. They need sidebar management for bookmarks.

They have it. You can add, delete, rename, move, etc., your bookmarks from the Boomark sidebar. Again, have you really used Phoenix, as in for more than 30 seconds? I really don't think you have. Almost all of your "complaints" are false.

Still twice the size of Opera

[Kjella]

Mozilla: 11mb
Phoenix 0.3 Win: 7mb
Opera 6.05 Win (no java): 3.4mb

Granted, there are a few issues about Opera (particularly that they ship with "Identify as IE" as default, which makes it hell to fix things that doesn't work right in Opera. I've actually got three different things in FAQs, Opera needs to identify as

1. Opera, not IE
2. IE, not Opera
3. Mozilla/Nutscrape, not Opera OR IE

Of course the answer should be easy, it should identify as Opera and web designers program accordingly. And all should use the real HTML standard, not the IE-"standard"... riiiiiight.

Still, I look forward to seeing a streamlined browser. I hated Netscapes "suite", and I don't like the Mozilla "suite" either. The browser's okay, but for the other stuff I certainly know of better alternatives.

Kjella

Re:Memory reports in Linux are NEVER accurate!

[FooBarWidget]

"So is there no way of finding out how much is shared? Its useful, because my concern is a web browser for a multi-user machine, and I dont want the memory to run out if 10 people are running mozilla.."

Memory is shared between all 10 Mozilla sessions.

The best way to watch your memory is to use /usr/bin/free, Gkrellm (with memory monitor) or the system monitor applets for the GNOME or KDE panel.