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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."
if only I could moderate the guys doing this...a browser that only browses, small, lean and fast. Such a great idea...(+5 sensible)
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
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.
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.
...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?
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
Got brain?
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).
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" ?
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.
. . . 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!
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.
life+universe+everything=42
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.
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).
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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]
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.
Here's a help site dedicated to Phoenix, created by David Tenser. Announced in this thread on MozillaZine, and see also the Phoenix forums.
Got brain?
(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
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!
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.
There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. (Francis Bacon)
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!! 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. 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.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings