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Phoenix 0.4 Released
Clark Kent writes "Mozilla's little brother browser,
Phoenix, has reached
version 0.4. New enhancements include themes support, type ahead find, and
number of improvements to pop-up blocking, toolbar customization, and tabbed
browsing, as well as the usual bug fixes.
Get it here."
Um.. well see, it comes with one BUILT IN, in case you didnt notice, in the upper right hand corner.. of course, it doesn't have all the features that I personally never used in the "real deal" google toolbar (pagerank, highlight, etc), but maybe that's what you crave. But for a quick search it's certainly handy.
Joseph?
From their FAQ: (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-r elease-notes.html)
*************
17. "Phoenix is getting bloated. I knew it would happen."
Phoenix is not getting bloated. Its download size is going down, for one thing. As stated earlier, the time to do the heavy lifting, feature work and redesign is early in the development cycle. That's where we are now -- this is 0.4, folks!
We're working hard to improve our support for extensions to reduce bloat. Without extensions support, we'd be pressured to include the add-ons in the default build.
Because IE is full of bugs and holes. It's probably the most insecure piece of software on the planet. And since MS were dumb enough to tie IE in with the OS, an IE hole can threaten your whole system. Use it at your own risk...
OLPC Australia
My "clock on the wall" tests seem to confirm what the early automated performance tests suggest: that Phoenix is about 30% faster at startup than Mozilla and about 40% faster at creating new windows. Phoenix developers have also made tweaks to lots of other interface items to improve UI responsiveness and even the rendering engine has been slightly tweaked which improves perceived performance and give Phoenix a some "zip" that's lacking in Mozilla. Not only that but the developers cut the download size by about 40% while adding a bunch of new features like toolbar customization and pop-up blocking whitelists.
--Asa
like galeon, if this thing will introduce more features, it will slow down even a bit more.
Actually, they're adding features and performance together. Phoenix is getting smaller, faster and more featureful all at the same time.
--Asa
Why should I switch from IE?
You'd switch because Phoenix has a better feature set. Phoenix makes the web enjoyable again by sparing you from pop-ups and giving you tabbed browsing for a much more organized browsing experience. You'd switch because you're concerned about people using IE to steal your files or execute arbitrary code on your machine. You'd switch because Phoenix is an easy migration. You'd switch because Phoenix works and there's just something "right" about using a free and open solution especially one that works well.
--Asa
Alright, I'll bite. I switched from a combo of IE/Mozilla to Phoenix exclusively with 0.3 and that's what I'm using right now. The reasons I switched:
1) Fast startup time
2) Tabbed browsing
3) Radial Context menus (Optimoz component)
4) Mouse Gestures (Optimoz component)
5) Popup blocking and *whitelists*
6) Finegrained control over Javascript
7) Sherlock plugins (using Mycroft)
8) Preferences toolbar extension (remove fonts, colors, images, disable javascript, change useragent on the fly, etc.)
9) Extensive toolbar customization
10) Download manager
11) Better security than IE
12) Gecko rendering engine is more DOM-compliant
The only thing missing that I need is cookie blacklists. But IE doesn't have that either.
As someone who converted from IE 6 at the .2 release of Phoenix I thought I'd chime in.
.4, you can use ctrl- and 1-0 to alternate quickly among your first 10 tabs (on top of ctrl-page up and down to just go back and forth) so if you are more keyboard oriented you can cycle around quickly still.
First off, tabs, greatest thing on earth. Run one copy of Phoenix, view as many pages as you want. And with
Secondly, resources. My pc (mind you it's an old p2 300 with 416 megs of RAM) used to slowly go down to almost no resources until I had to reboot, now since I switched to phoenix (no other changes) I live in the 40+% range (usually 50+).
Third, as someone else said but can't be reiterated enough, popup killing, as well as ad image blocking. Wonderful tools in the horrible overjavascripted web of today
fourth, speed. It seems to flow a lot faster for me then IE... probably in the seconds range, which in many instances even on a modem like I'm on, can be a LOT.
All in all, phoenix is just a solid piece of software that has nowhere to go but up.
You get one built in and you can populate it with about 150 additional search engines by going to mozdev.org and installing additional mycroft plugins (they're very tiny, give it a try).
--Asa
googlebar
I tried it on Phoenix 0.2 and it worked. Not sure if it will on the newer versions. I heard there are problems with installing it on certain platforms as well.
You should have taken the time to read the release notes. You are supposed to delete 0.3 and then unpack 0.4, not just overwrite 0.3.
People using Gentoo should check this link, it works great on my computer after I created a link to the 'missing' libc6-library.
As for memory footprint and speed: Yes, Phoenix *definitely* is a lot better, even compared to optimized builds (i.e. homecompiled with optimalisations, as Gentoo does)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I don't think themes should be included in a lean & mean browser.
"themes" aren't included in Phoenix. Phoenix has one UI (which is defined in part in images and CSS). The nature of the UI makes it possible for other people to easily create new styles or themes (images and CSS). Phoenix contains a trivial amount of code to manage the install and uninstall of themes but the themes themselves are 3rd party components and are not "include in" Phoenix.
--Asa
Phoenix should really ship with that extension, it's just great, you can do *EVERYTHING* with tabs with that extension.
Oh, really? Looks like it has blacklists and whitelists. Although you can see I don't bother with them.
apt-get install googlizer
or
http://packages.debian.org/googliz
Slight modification to make it work for everything2 compliments it well.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
View selection source is available in Phoenix (and Mozilla). Just make a selection and context click on it for the menuitem.
Google toolbar fir IE is nice. I prefer Phoenix's search field with about 15 search engines (from mycroft.mozdev.org) including google groups, news and images. It has a nifty find in page feature too (but that's as useful as the "highlight" bookmarklet that actually styles every instance of the term on the page like google cache does).
Phoenix (the topic of this discussion is Phoenix, not Mozilla) has a UI that's a lot snappier than Mozilla.
Edit coming soon (use the system default editor).
You should give it a try. It's a 7MB download. You just unzip it and double-click on the Phoenix app icon. If you don't like it then drag the folder to the trash.
--Asa
If you want privacy, it's worth upgrading for that alone (plus all the exploit fixes). Then Tools:Internet Options:Privacy and you're free to play.
Mozilla is plenty fast on my systems, but phoenix absolutely SMOKES any browser I have ever seen, by a very, very long shot. Seriously, wow. They're doing something right.
I like Phoenix a lot - it's going to be my main browser pretty soon if it keeps going the way it's going. However, there *are* faster browsers out there, Opera for one. Dillo is probably the fastest browser in the universe, you really have to see it to believe it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Ok let me ask something. In Windows there is what we call "The task bar (tm)". With "The task bar", every window has a tab. Now what is the use of having these tabs in a bar in the browser window, instead of having them in "The task bar" hmmm ?
You mention part of the problem yourself. In the Task Bar, Windows put all windows that it has opened, while the Phoenix/Mozilla tabs only contain actual web pages. Microsoft tried to fix this slight mess in Windows XP by grouping the tabs by task, but even with this feature turned on, you first need to find the Phoenix tab among the sometimes rather large amount of tasks, then click on it and then look up the web page you wished to access in the sub menu that pop up.
Navigating through your tasks with Alt-Tab also becomes a hassle since there are usually so many tasks active -- much easier to navigate with Ctrl-Tab / PgUp / PgDown in Phoenix to switch between the open web pages only (what you intended to do in the first place).
And, as the Anonymous Coward mentioned, Phoenix also allow you to save and restore groups of tabs.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Because some people often have an awful lot of tabs open at the same time. I more often than not have 20 or more at a time. Try fitting all that in the taskbar when you've got other applications running, along with the Start button and a fair few systray applets.
For some moronic reason, they're not porting Phoenix because they think that Chimera is supposed to be the one and only "lite" browser for OS X.
However, there were already Galeon and K-Meleon for Linux and Windows, so why are they working on and releasing Phoenix at all?
Anyway, some guy did a quick and dirty 'port' of Phoenix to OS X - he changed two line of code, then built it. Almost too easy; maintaining an OS X port would be trivial.
I really do wonder why the Phoenix project leaders have been so insistent on shunning the Mac...
Actually at the moment, there is no truely real way to switch. This is because some programs (mainly Microsofts) insist on firing up IE for a URL even when some other application is registered as being the default browser.
It's in the MSKB as a bug, until thats fixed, I still have to deal with occasionally IE loading when I don't want it.
(Of course I'm ignoring the fact that the IE dlls are almost in constant use - before anyone points it out)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I have a 200mhz laptop w/ 96 M ram, and a 1.4 ghz desktop w/ 256M ram.
On the laptop,
Mozilla: Painfully slow
Phoenix: Usable
On the desktop:
Mozilla: The best browser I have ever used
Phoenix: Not sufficiently faster to make up for the fact that I can't search google straight out of the address bar.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Did any other mozilla users notice tabs behave consistently in Phoenix? You can not only middle-click on links to open them in a new tab, but also on bookmarks!
Now I'd just like the same behavior on form buttons...
"And like that
Just for reference, the computer I'm using is a Thinkpad P2-233, 288mb RAM, 512mb pagefile and a 10gb IBM 4500RPM HDD, running Windows 2000 Pro SP2.
... but when it reacts more sluggishly still than Netscape 4.79, I think I'll wait a while before using it as my primary browser.
All times are the average of three or four tests, eyeballing the clock.
Startup Time
Netscape 4.79: 4s
Phoenix 0.4: 10s
Slashdot Homepage Load Time
Netscape 4.79: 1.5s
Phoenix 0.4: 2.5s
RAM Usage (with only Slashdot Homepage loaded)
Netscape 4.79: 8012k
Phoenix 0.4: 20,182k
Now, don't get me wrong, I think that the fact that the Phoenix people are trying to make a slim browser is great!
(BTW, this is the main reason I don't use Mozilla... it's a DOG on this machine. Even IE's kinda slow.)
Cool. But you forgot something. Read the release notes for 0.4.
I'll quote it here:
Use the damn built-in Windows MIME types!
Often, this is because of a misconfigured web server installation that doesn't recognize the .zip extension and send the application/zip media type. It may send the older media type application/x-zip-compressed or the generic application/octet-stream; Windows doesn't find an association for either of those types.
On the other hand, IE will sometimes ignore the media type and use the file's extension instead. This is part of what led to the <iframe> vulnerability, which Nimda and Klez exploited
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are more tests available through the parent of that link. The latest version of Mozilla seems to do very well on the tests. IE 6 for Windows does poorly on many.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You could always try reading the release notes
Its knows issue # 2
Personally, I find that I can't live without my mouse-gestures, so I wind up using Mozilla as may daily browser now; plus when I tried the Google toolbar I didn't find it to be that useful.
As an endnote, I tried installing the Googlebar on my copy of Mozilla 1.2 beta, and it didn't work. Although it appears that in the process of uninstalling it I screwed something up, so I'm going to get to reinstall Mozilla anyway (yay...).
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow.
Excercise more. They "feel" fine to me. Mozilla is only slow for me on bringing up some of the dialogs and windows, everything else is just as speedy if not speedier than IE especially in the stable builds.
2. Google toolbar.
This answer probably won't satisfy you, but I personally hate extraneous toolbars. For a normal google search, I type my query into the address bar and an entry pops up in the combo box that lets me run a Google search on that string. For everything else, there's bookmark keywords. For an image query, I set up the appropriate bookmark, type into the address bar something like "img foo" and a Google page of images matching "foo" comes up. Likewise, I have mine set up that "fm" searches freshmeat and "bug" queries the Mozilla bugzilla database.
As far as the Mozdev Googlebar itself goes, you might want to take another look. They're constantly tweaking the thing and it wouldn't surprise me if your features are there already. I'm downloading it now, but I don't want to jeopardize this session by installing it right this second.
3.Edit button.
Mozilla comes with its very own web authoring component called Composer. Click on File --> Edit Page and you're there. Source is one more click away.
If it's web developement you're looking for, you're in luck as Mozilla specifically caters to web developers. Composer is a good WYSIWYG editor with the option of playing with the source whenever you please. Mozilla also comes with a handy DOM inspector and indispensible javascript debugger. Just about the only thing it lacks is a built-in HTML validator and it wouldn't surprise me too much if there were someone working on adding one.
4.View Partial Source.
Mozilla's got it. No add-on needed. Highlight what you want, right click, select View Selection Source.
I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page.
View --> Page Info, click on Media tab. Voila, a list of all images/icons/whatever that the page loads inline. Page Info also reveals all kinds of other stuff including, but not limited to, meta tags, header info, form components, links, and security.
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract.
If AdSubtract is a filtering proxy, I suspect you can use it with Mozilla just fine. If not, there are other solutions that work just as well. I personally install Junkbuster (now Privoxy) on my gateway machine and have all web browsers proxy through that. Works extremely well for me.
Here's my page [simpli.biz] that demonstrates exactly what AdSubtract does. It's so much more powerful than what Mozilla does that I'm amazed more people don't talk about it.
I'm sure it's a fine program, but it's third party software. It didn't come with IE, so why do you expect Mozilla to come with that kind of functionality? Mozilla might not have the flexibility of AdSubtract but then neither does IE. While Mozilla can give you some control over cookies and ads, I don't use them. I use a third-party program, Junkbuster, which is compatible with every web browser that can connect to a proxy.
The features I use in IE may be some of the more obscure ones, but until I see functional equivalents in Mozilla, I won't be switching.
I've responded to almost all of your feature requests with, "yes, Mozilla can do that." Perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate your opinions, both on IE and Mozilla. I've been using Mozilla full-time for at least 2 years now (long before it was stable, anyway) and haven't looked back since.
It's worth noting (again) that when you choose "block images from server", it still *downloads* the image, it just doesn't *show* you the image. This, I think, defeats most of the purpose of blocking images. Cast in a vote for bug 94118 in bugzilla if you think it's worth changing too.
I think I'll wait until Phoenix gets a little smaller until I consider switching to it from Mozilla. According to their site they plan on reducing it from 9mb to 6mb by replacing certain components with lighter equivalents. The reason I don't see the switch as worth it now is because I can get Mozilla to become browser only simply by running a custom install and only selecting the browser and the security manager (for ssl support). It really does help and seems to cut the load time in half. I recommend to anyone upgrading/installing Mozilla for the first time to try it. In fact most people who notice Phoenix running much faster probably installed Mozilla with the default options. For me it's about a tie right now.
Something on a blacklist is considered unacceptable, to be boycotted, or censured. A whitelist is the opposite -- something to be accepted. Since Phoenix can be set to block all popups (everything is blacklisted by default), the user then adds sites to the whitelist. A site on the whitelist will be allowed to have its popups show up. This is handy for sites that use popup windows legitimately.
In Phoenix, when a site attempts to launch a popup window, an icon shows up on the bottom. When clicked, the site can be whitelisted.
OK I finally figured out how to get Gestures in Phoenix: (Preferences -> Themes and Extensions -> Extensions -> Get New Extensions)
But can anyone tell me how to configure them?? I want to use the middle mouse button instead of control+left button. Thanks!
Random is the New Order.
user_pref("mozgest.delay", 500);
user_pref("mozgest.grid", 15);
user_pref("mozgest.modifier.alt", false);
user_pref("mozgest.modifier.ctrl", false);
user_pref("mozgest.modifier.shift", false);
user_pref("mozgest.mousebutton", 1);
user_pref("mozgest.navigator", true);
Random is the New Order.
[ Win32 only, though. ]
As long as this (undocumented) feature remains in the code, you can make Phoenix, like Mozilla, have a quick launch thing so it starts nearly instantly. Have a shortcut in your startup folder that runs "phoenix.exe -turbo" (with appropriate paths). Worry not; this will not start the browser, just the quicklaunch.
Now, Phoenix has the same advantage IE has (grumble grumble).
The space unintentionally left unblank.
After seeing how quickly the browser loaded and checking out the great new features I was quickly disappointed to find that I could not change any preferences in regard to mouse gestures.
In Mozilla I had my mouse gestures set to use the middle mouse button and I'm completely hooked on that. Now I find there is no way to do this in Pheonix.
*sigh*
Does anyone know if there's any way of porting some of the UI speed improvements back to mozilla? Or if someone will come along and make a version of mozilla that's been tweaked for windows so it doesn't take forever? The only thing I don't like about Phoenix is that when you shift-click, it opens in a new window instead of downloading the link.
* Phoenix utilizes large hunks of Mozilla code. Many of the problems you may experience in Phoenix are actually problems in this Mozilla core code. If you find a problem with page content or connectivity then it is probably a Mozilla problem and should be reported to the Browser product in Bugzilla and not to the Phoenix product.
* Phoenix 0.4 does not work on Windows95. This is a problem with core Mozilla code and probably impacts all Mozilla-based products created after about Oct. 23rd.
* Opening new location by pasting (middle-click) into rendering area is not working.
* Site icons (favicons) are lost after crashes and are sometimes associated with the wrong bookmark. Clearing your cache (Tools|Preferences|Privacy) will clear your bookmark favicons so they can be redownloaded when next visiting that site.
* If your menubar becomes inactive after toolbar customization then you probably didn't read the install notes and install your new build to a clean directory (and create a new profile for use with 0.4).
* If pop-up whitelisting doesn't seem to work then you probably didn't read the install notes and create a new profile for use with Phoenix 0.4.
* Talkback builds are not available for 0.4.
* The sidebar will persist across new windows, but not across sessions (if you shut down with it open, it will be closed upon restart).
* Quicksearch in bookmarks and history still have a couple of issues. We don't yet support deleting filtered results for bookmarks and history filtering is case sensitive. We expect to have these issues fixed in future releases. For additional issues, FAQs, Tips and Tricks plus general Phoenix help be sure to check out David Tenser's very cool Phoenix Help site and the mozillaZine Phoenix forums."
One can only assume that since it's in the Known Issues section that it's probably on their to-do list.
I don't have a sig, can I borrow yours?