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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."
Has anyone noticed a real speed improvement over Mozilla (when only the browser is compiled in)?
{{.sig}}
Why should I switch from IE?
(Because it is Microsoft is not a valid answer)
What makes Phoenix so cool that I should bother with it?
Compare things like features, security, and resource usage.
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.
Joseph?
There is a small textbox top right next to the address bar with a looking glass. If you click the pull down icon, you can select google.
;-)
I think it's an excellent concept
Yuioup
Anyone made .debs yet? sources.list lines, please?
The post suggests that theme support is new to 0.4. That's probably my fault for a not-as-clear-as-it-could-have-been release note. Phoenix uses XUL. Part of XUL is that the browser GUI is styled using images and CSS. That makes any XUL-based product "skinable". This is the first release of Phoenix where there were a number of completed themes available but it is not the first release with support for themes. Theme support is a byproduct of the decision to build the UI with images and CSS (XUL). For more information and discussion of Phoenix themes and other Phoenix issues check out the MozillaZine Phoenix forums.
--Asa
What a fast release cycle this has, certainly compared to Mozilla!
Phoenix is young and moving fast. The release cycles have averaged a couple weeks. Development is progressing really fast, though. That's because XUL is an extremely easy and fast environment in which to build applications and the two or three developers building Phoenix are the top XUL hackers on the planet (the guys that invented XUL). The Mozilla application framework has also seriously matured, making it much easier to build these kinds of appa. Scores of great reusable widgets, an awesome rendering engine, a top notch neyworking library, and a great security library give you all the pieces you need to assemble a variety of web-enabled apps. Check out mozdev.org for dozens of great XUL-based projects.
--Asa
A small comparison on my computer, which is an AMD Duron 750 with plenty (768 MB) of SDRAM-133. I'm running Gentoo 1.4 (GCC 3.2), so the Mozilla build is optimized. I'm running Phoenix 0.4 and Mozilla 1.1.
Startup, when both programs have been started before (e.g. large parts are probably cached in memory). Used my digital clock for this so, it's not that accurate, but a good indication:
Mozilla: 5-6 seconds
Phoenix: 1-2 seconds
Memory usage after startup, using google.com as homepage (measured using top):
Mozilla: Physical memory in use=24 MB (of which 15 MB is shared)
Phoenix: Physical memory in use=19MB (of which 12.5 MB is shared)
After browsing some sites which I will mention here so people can reproduce this if they want:
nu.nl, slashdot.org, tweakers.net (which is heavy on javascript), kde.org, tomshardware.com, cnn.com
FYI I don't have Java or Flash plugins installed, so Flash banners do not have influence on the Mozilla memory footprint.
memory usage is:
Mozilla: RSS=33 MB
Phoenix: RSS=25 MB
Not to mention that Phoenix feels a lot faster and more responsive.
So yeah, even an optimized Mozilla can't beat Phoenix by far. Go try it sometime if your biggest gripe about Mozilla is that it's a) slow and b) uses too much memory.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow. The buttons just feel "heavy" to me. IE6 feels light and it looks like a Windows program. Plus, it loads more quickly.
2. Google toolbar. Yeah, I've used the mozdev one... and it's just not as impressive. I cannot do the following with the Mozdev bar:
3.Edit button. Again, a feature that rocks. I'm not sure how many people use this, but as a web developer, I do on pretty much a daily basis. Example: I need to pull a table from a website I'm working on. One click and the whole HTML source is loaded up in Dreamweaver MX and I'm working on editing the HTML. No FTP'ing the file down and then finding it on my hard drive. I just pull it straight from IE.
4.View Partial Source. Once again, mostly a web developer tool, but an invaluable one at that. I highlight any part of the page, click "View Partial Source", and I'm staring at the source code that created that part of the page. This is part of the IE5 Web Developer Tools add-on, and it works fine with IE6. I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page. (Not sure if Mozilla has that.)
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract. Once again, I cannot recommend this highly enough. In addition to blocking popups, it blocks ALL advertisements. Plus, you can tell it to turn on/off Javascript, cookies, referrers, and pretty much anything else on a per-site basis. Just add the URL to the list and check which things you want to block, and you're set. It's configurable via your systray. This program is awesome.
Here's my page 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 suppose I should add the usual disclaimer that I don't work for any of the above companies, etc. I'm just a PHP/web developer. I thought I should add my reasons for not using Mozilla, though, just so you can have both sides of the story. I'd also hope that any Mozilla developers reading this (Asa?) will take this story into account when it comes time to figure out what features should go into the next version of Mozilla. 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.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
That I was testing some of our sites with a fellow employee, when after a while he seemed puzzled as to why one of the buttons didn't seem to click (Mozilla doesn't seem to like myform.button.value, you have to put document.myform.button.value). He seemed visibly surprised when I told him I wasn't using Explorer. Then I showed him reading down a web page, right clicking on links where they loaded in tabs in the background... then going and reading each of the pages afterwards. Plus right clicking on tabs to instantly close them. He was very impressed.
Even though Phoenix is faster and more stable than Explorer, I found the only real way to switch was to delete all the Explorer icons from the desktop and the taskbar. Otherwise some old habits are too hard to break!
Phoenix combined with Privoxy (plus the occasional run of AdAware)... the currently unbeatable combination on WinXP.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The main thing peeps use the toolbar for is quick search - that's built right into Moz and baby broth. Just type yer search string into the address bar and either down arrow and enter or the "search" icon. More advanced features (such as PageRank and Backward link finding) are useful for web developers (like myself), but can be pretty easily used still. For backward links, type "link:http://www.whateversite.com/" and hit search. You could even set up a favelet to deal with this for you. For PageRank, you can browse the directory - but obviously that is more cumbersome than the toolbar. I will try and find a way of finding pagerank more quickly without it... Mozilla really is a pleasure to surf with when you get used to it - I couldn't return to IE now unless MS did something amazing, it feels like using NS 4.7 used to when I test on it now...
This is the fourth time I've downloaded a Phoenix build, and the second time that running it does nothing visible. My machine is a Pentium II running Windows 95. (I think it's Win95B. Not sure. "VER" says "Windows 95. [Version 4.00.1111]".)
....)
PHOENI~1.ZIP 8,691,111 09-26-02 4:01p phoenix-win32.zip
PHOENI~2.ZIP 7,806,796 10-04-02 9:47a phoenix-0.2-win32.zip
PHOENI~3.ZIP 7,360,073 10-16-02 9:55a phoenix-0.3-win32.zip
PHOENI~4.ZIP 7.396,544 10-30-02 8:14a phoenix-0.4-win32.zip
The first one (a nightly build somewhere around 0.1) and the last one (0.4 milestone) do not run. They both give me the same behavior: after typing "PHOENIX", the mouse cursor changes to the arrow-plus-hourglass for a few seconds, then changes back to normal. There is no new task in the task manager after that. For all visible purposes, phoenix crashed with no errors and no core file. (Of course, there's no core file. This is Windows. Why would we be able to debug it? No strace, no gdb, no truss,
Phoenix 0.2 and 0.3 both run perfectly well on this same computer. So I've gone back to 0.3.
"PHOENIX -ProfileManager" also does nothing. Same symptoms. I've even tried deleting the 0.3 profiles using Phoenix 0.3's ProfileManager before running Phoenix 0.4. No change.
running mozilla 1.2beta2 built with xft2 support has spoiled me with its awesome fonts....when will we see xft2 builds of phoenix? thanks!
w|f
http://mozillako.hypermart.net/ieskin/
After installing it, you'll be surprised at how much "faster" mozilla seems.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I still use Mozilla most of the time, because I use Mozilla Mail as my mail client, but I have been using Nightly builds of Phoenix from time to time, and I have to say I'm impressed. With the Tabbed browsing extensions and Optimoz installed I think it is the best browser I have come accross.
I think that Phoenix is more than a good web browser though, I think it is nothing less than a complete vindication of the Mozilla project. Pheonix shows that all of the time put into Mozilla has not just produced bloat, it has also produced a code base that is useful enough to make something extremely efficent and effective, extremely quickly.
It is also very good to see something come out of Mozilla that isn't just an unbranded version of Netscape, and I would like to see more of this. Given the work that is going into producing the GRE (Gecko Runtime Environment) which aims to make a distribution of the bits of Mozilla that are used by everything, so that programs can be linked against it without needing the whole broweser suite to be installed, I think that Pheonix and other apps like it (a mail reader and all the rest) could be the future of Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 was both a Monolithic Communications Suite and an application framework, and Phoenix has shown the power of that frame work. I would like it if Mozilla 2.0 was just a framework, but it was released with a set of standalone programs that worked well together, but could be used equally well seperately, and I think it would do Mozilla's credibility a lot of good if it was something that definately isn't Netscape.
I wonder if anyone at Mozilla.org is thinking like this.
psr --History is ending.