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Phoenix 0.5 Has Arrived
mattrix was among the legion of readers to submit news that "Phoenix 0.5 (Naples) has been released. New stuff since 0.4 includes multiple homepages, download fixes, history, size, memory, accessibility and performance improvements and more. Get it now for Windows or GNU/Linux (i686). Background info: Phoenix is a web browser based on the Mozilla engine, but smaller and faster than Mozilla Navigator." Multi-tab startup page seems worth the upgrade to me, all else aside.
Tools/Preferences/General/Location(s):
You can enter the URL's separated by pipes (|). Or just click 'Use current page(s)' when you have your tab set open to the pages you want. It's way cool.
The best place to discuss Phoenix is at the Mozillazine Phoenix forums.
Extensions are available here -- including radial context and mouse gestures.
Themes are available here and there's a beautiful page of similar-but-different themes here.
And don't forget to head on over to themes.mozdev.org for some tasty chrome! Orbit 3+1 is my personal favourite.
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
If you want to use anti-aliased fonts with Phoenix 0.5 on Linux for x86, you can grab pre-built Xft-enabled binaries.
Xft Enabled RPMs and tarballs built under RedHat 8.
Xft Enabled tarball built under Debian unstable.
If you aren't running RedHat 8 or Debian unstable, then you may have to do some work to get these pre-built binaries to run.
I am running the Debian unstable Xft-enabled Phoenix 0.5 binary. It works just fine, and looks ever so good.
If, like me, you've been using Mozilla's mouse gestures feature for a while you're probably hooked. The good news it that they are available for Phoenix as well:
http://texturizer.net/phoenix/extensions.html#gest ures
Unfortunately there is no menu option to trigger them with the right mouse button (they default to being activated by the left button). If you want them on the right mouse button you will have to edit your prefs.js file. On Windows (depending on what version you are running) this can be found in C:\Windows\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\???\???\prefs.js
Before editing the prefs.js file you will need to install the gestures XPI, then restart your browser and shut it down again (this will create the default mouse gesture preferences in the prefs.js file). Now open the file in a text editor and look for the following line:
user_pref("mozgest.mousebutton", 0);
Change the number to 2 for right mouse button (or 1 for middle mouse button) and you're done.
I don't mean to be a troll, but in my experience, Phoenix is no real improvement over Mozilla in terms of startup speed, at least for OS/2. Phoenix starts up about three seconds faster than Mozilla on a 200MHz 80586 with 64MB of RAM running OS/2 Warp v3, which isn't saying much when Mozilla takes damn near a minute to open.
From phoenix's FAQ:
.6
14)
I kept hearing that you were changing the name from Phoenix to something else. What happened?
That was just a giant publicity stunt. We've observed that in the past, the open-source community has instinctively favored David when big corporations complain of trademark infringement. We wanted to cash in on this sympathy by asking the community to send us money to fight the legal battle (obviously we'd really spend it on cool stuff), but with all the taxing issues and whatnot we decided to can the idea.
15)
Uhhhh...really?
No, not really. This isn't like an action flick where the evil madman reveals the intricacies of his plans to hostages and then leaves them alone with a bomb set to detonate in like 10 hours. When we're ripping you off, we won't explain how in the FAQ. The truth is that we'd already had this 0.5 released planned for awhile, so it was okay to release under the Phoenix name. But under no circumstances will any future release be called Phoenix.
So it would appear that they will be changing the name for
Unfortunately not very well known, you can easily override all CSS, effectively disabling as much as you want. Customizing Mozilla, completely applicable to Phoenix. This page covers a lot. Place overriding CSS rules on userContent.css, with '!important' after the rules, before the semicolon. Opera provides for this mechanism very well.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
The main reason is that MSVC++ produces much smaller (and faster) code than g++ does. This is especially true because g++ 2.9x is being used, with only -O (not -O2, because that produces buggy code) optimization.
Moving to gcc 3.2 (once the Sun people get off their friggin' asses and compile Java with it) will help perf and footprint a lot (15% improvement or so last I heard).