Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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
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!
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.)
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.