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."

Comments

Speed?

[chrysalis]

Has anyone noticed a real speed improvement over Mozilla (when only the browser is compiled in)?

Re:Convince Me

[tunah]

Tabbed browsing, for one.

Personally, I cannot use IE anymore because I am so accustomed to this feature.

Theme support isn't exactly new

[asa]

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

Re:Look at them go!

[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

Maybe some numbers will convince people?

[Idaho]

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.

Why I won't switch from IE (yet).

[SlashChick]

It's not really that I really love IE. A browser is a browser. That said, there are a lot of people posting on why they switched from IE to Mozilla, so I thought I'd offer the top reasons why I stay with IE. (Note: I've used Mozilla 1.0 and 1.2.)

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:

• Search images/newsgroups with one click. With IE, I type in a search term and click the image button and voila, I'm searching images.google.com. This might have been fixed recently in Mozdev, but it wasn't the last time I checked.
• Of critical importance is the search word and highlight feature. Often I'll search for something like "Linux sendmail configuration." What comes up? Newsgroup posts, and often several LONG pages of them. I search via the toolbar and then click the "sendmail" button on the right, and IE scrolls down to the first occurrence of that word. Put simply, this rocks. It nearly eliminates the need for Ctrl-F and makes my searches at least 10 times as fast (since I don't have to scroll down manually or Ctrl-F and type in the word again.)
  
• Highlight/PageRank. I don't use these as often as the find word feature, but they're still a consideration. I don't want to switch browsers and lose functionality.

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.

Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet).

[SlashChick]

Thanks for replying.

First of all, I'd recommend that the Edit button be implemented with a click/drop-down list like IE's is. You click on the button and it opens in the default editor for that filetype. Click on the arrow next to it and it displays all the editors on your system that can edit that type of file, and you can choose one from the list. It's useful.

Secondly, I don't know about this Google toolbar replacement thing. Google is pretty much my sole search engine, though I wouldn't mind having dictionary and translate buttons. I'm not convinced that Phoenix's replacement can compare (Mozilla's couldn't.)

Third, a "snappier" UI does not necessarily mean a better UI. A faster UI I can appreciate, but honestly, Mozilla felt clunky to me in more ways than one. I hope Phoenix strives to eliminate this.

A couple of other things I forgot to mention that I also hope Mozilla/Phoenix can rectify:

Use the damn built-in Windows MIME types! Jeez! I shouldn't have to tell Mozilla how to open a .zip file. I think that was the #1 thing (besides the UI) that really turned me off to Mozilla. They're all sitting there in the registry. Please use them. (I sincerely hope this has already been fixed.)

Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)

And honestly, to be a little evil, I'd like to see a "Windows XP IE clone." I mean, something I could throw at my mother and say, "This is the new version of Internet Explorer!" and she would really believe it. If I'm going to get on the evangelism bandwagon with web browsers again (and I've been off that bandwagon since I stopped being a die-hard Netscape fan in 1998), I want to get people to switch. Obviously, they want something that looks similar to IE. (Keep in mind that IE on XP looks radically different from IE on previous versions of Windows.) I'd welcome a theme like that as well.

I'm rambling. I'm going to stop this and head to bed now. At this point, I hope you have a better idea of what at least one interested party is looking for in a web browser.

Good luck with the Phoenix project, by the way. I think it's a great idea, no matter how it turns out. This market needs a bit of competition. :)

Real sign of success is...

[horza]

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.