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.

Comments

Name change

[Cheesy Fool]

Wasn't the name supposed to be changed for this release?

Re:Name change

[cioxx]

Well, according to their forums, last time I checked the poll was split 60/40 in keeping the name Phoenix and battling it out with Phoenix Technologies for rights to use the name.

I would guess either a) They are waiting to change the name with 0.6 -or- b) They are testing the patience of Phoenix Technologies ;)

Either way, I don't like the idiotic request from PT. It's not like these two are competing technologies. And phoenix is a generic word. What are they going to do next? Patent the word "Technologies"?

In any event. Phoenix is a straight up IE killer, and it's all that matters.

Re:Name change

[Big Mark]

From the phoenix site:

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.

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.

-Mark

Re:Name change

[petabyte]

From phoenix's FAQ:

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 .6

Performance improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

From the changelog:
"Performance improvements

0.5 is certainly our fastest release ever. You might especially notice a boost if you have a blank page (about:blank) as your homepage."

Does this mean that Phoenix renders a blank page faster than any other browser?

Re:Performance improvements

[Loki_1929]

"Does this mean that Phoenix renders a blank page faster than any other browser?"

On a P4 3.06GHz (with SMT enabled), Radeon 9700 pro, 1GB PC2700, 18GB Cheetah X15 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drive, the Opera browser rendered a blank page 0.00000000234 nanoseconds faster than Phoenix 0.5. I suppose this means there's room for improvement before 0.6 in the blank page rendering benchmark.

Re:Performance improvements

[Angry White Guy]

Yeah, it doesn't have to check with windows update first, so it can get right down to business.

Re:Performance improvements

[MagPulse]

(2.34e-9 * 1e-9)/(1/(3.04e9)) = 7.1136e-9

How did you measure 7 billionths of a processor cycle?

Re:Performance improvements

[Loki_1929]

"How did you measure 7 billionths of a processor cycle?"

Top10 Answers:

10) With a Ruler
9) Very Carefully
8) Rather Quickly
7) With a Stopwatch
6) Listened Carefully
5) Did it 7 Billion times
4) Measured it against how long CmdrTaco lasts in bed
3) Had the Comp travelling at .994c
2) Rough Guess

And the number 1 answer:
1) Rounded up from 6.9 billionths of a processor cycle

Re:Performance improvements

[alexburke]

And the number 1 answer:

1) Rounded up from 6.9 billionths of a processor cycle

*sigh* I'm so disappointed! That should have read:

1) My Pentium rounded up from 6.9 billionths of a processor cycle, FDIV style

Kids these days... :)

Where?

[rutger21]

New stuff since 0.4 includes multiple homepages

So, where are Phoenix' other homepages?

Re:Where?

[thing12]

So, where are Phoenix' other homepages?

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.

nice browser, but still too big

[g4dget]

Phoenix is a nice browser. But it's still an 8.9M download for Linux. Does XUL really have that much overhead? How far can this be squeezed down?

Re:nice browser, but still too big

[yobbo]

Yet the windows installer is about 6MB. Instead of asking about the overhead of XUL, perhaps you should ask about the overhead of linux ports?

Don't get me wrong - I don't use windows at all. But builds of mozilla and phoenix ports are consistently larger than their windows counterparts. Why?

Re:nice browser, but still too big

[BZ]

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).

Re:multi tab startup

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care that they think they'd be competing with Chimera, there *NEEDS* to be a Mac OS X version that's keeping up with development.

On that platform we need MORE browsers, not fewer, in the hopes that ONE will actually be good: fast, stable, compatible, and feature complete.

Mozilla is feature riddled but has compatibility issues (TrekBBS.com; MS using propietary plug-in format for WMP on Mac OS) and S-L-O-W. Chimera is fast, not entirely stable, but lacking features or their poorly implemented (History, Location bar).

Phoenix forums, themes and extensions

[h2so4]

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.

Themes...

[breon.halling]

And don't forget to head on over to themes.mozdev.org for some tasty chrome! Orbit 3+1 is my personal favourite.

Pheonix vs Mozilla on Win32 (I prefer mozilla)

[j2gEEk]

The reason i prefer mozilla on win32 is quicklaunch. With quicklaunch enabled in my system tray, it launches significantly quicker than even pheonix. If pheonix was quicklaunch enabled (heck, the code's already there, right?), it would be my browser of choice on w32. Until then, I'll stick with the "big mo".

Jake

Re:Pheonix vs Mozilla on Win32 (I prefer mozilla)

[JanneM]

This is not intended as a flame or anything, but what is the point of quicklaunch, really? I realize it must be important in Win32, as so many people are talking about it. I mean, I start things like Phoenix and Evolution, and then have them running continuously, until I need to reboot or restart phoenix due to a memory leak or something - it's usually running for weeks at a time.

My guess is that the work pattern is different on a Win32 desktop, and that you normally start an app, use it, then close it before you start another. Is it due to the lack of virtual desktops, or some other UI-related issue? I would not think it's resources, as Windows should swap out unused apps just like other OS:s.

Re:Pheonix vs Mozilla on Win32 (I prefer mozilla)

[thing12]

This is not intended as a flame or anything, but what is the point of quicklaunch, really? I realize it must be important in Win32, as so many people are talking about it. I mean, I start things like Phoenix and Evolution, and then have them running continuously, until I need to reboot or restart phoenix due to a memory leak or something - it's usually running for weeks at a time.

Yep, exactly... people are whining because Mozilla doesn't start as fast as IE because its binary is 2x the size and actually takes much longer to be loaded off disk. Quicklaunch just adds that same amount of delay to the startup time after you log into your computer by preloading the massive binary. Phoenix on the other hand seems to take about as long to load the first time from a cold boot as IE does. And if you already have pheonix loaded it takes steps to speed it up even more and spawns a new thread from the existing browser.

My guess is that the work pattern is different on a Win32 desktop, and that you normally start an app, use it, then close it before you start another. Is it due to the lack of virtual desktops, or some other UI-related issue? I would not think it's resources, as Windows should swap out unused apps just like other OS:s.

My guess is that you're right about the work pattern. In older versions of windows resource handling was so poor that it seemed common to close apps when you weren't using them - of course this is all fixed now - but here's the rub: with quicklaunch enabled you aren't even conserving resources by closing Mozilla! Also worth noting is that virtual desktops are available as a powertoy for XP... but again the work pattern issue rises - people don't know how to use a modern system effectively.

Who knows, maybe people will wise up eventually.

Differences from K-Meleon Browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone enlighten me to any differences between this broskwer and The K Meleon Browser? I have been using the latter a lot recently and am wondering why phoenix gets so much more press..

Re:Differences from K-Meleon Browser?

[C14L]

and am wondering why phoenix gets so much more press.

IIRC KM was almost dead for quite a time. Both browsers are more or less the same. Phoenix uses XUL for its interface, KM doesn't. KM uses its own scripting that is very easy to do, so KM becomes easily costumizable by everybody. I use Phoenix now, because KM repeatedly crashed, and it corrupted also my bookmarks-file (especially letters like ä, ö, ü, etc and arabic or chinese characters were rendered unreadable (I use one bookmark-file for all browsers).

Clean up the skins mess for christ sake

[joshv]

I wish the mozilla team would clean up the skins mess . I downloaded 1.2 recently and couldn't get a single downloaded skin to work. The same happened when I last downloaded phoenix a few weeks ago. I though the idea behind the 1.x release was to stabilize the APIs. If so, why is it so damned hard to have skins that work across multiple releases?

-josh

Re:So let me get this straight...

[thing12]

Is this to say that Mozilla is already considered bloated and people are asking for a stripped-down version like Phoenix? Just goes to show there are some people you can never make happy.

The Mozilla project's goal is not to make a browser for end users. It's essentially a technology preview. Always has been - always will be. It shows off Gecko, XUL, the portable runtime, and a few other nifty things. Phoenix is an implementation of all that technology; it shares a common codebase but there are massive changes and additions that make it a new and separate project. All this work has made Phoenix an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer on any version of Windows -- Mozilla isn't.

The one thing I wish someone would write is a XUL based file manager. Something on the order of Phoenix. That's all that needs to be added really and you could mostly leave explorer unused on a Windows box. It would be nice to be able to use the same user interface to do things on Windows/Linux/Unix/Mac/etc... Microsoft was worried about Netscape becoming the desktop, and it could still happen.

What's Mozilla On?

[Lu Xun]

With the steady increase in computer power (led by the Moore company I believe) and larger disk drive space, why does anyone need a SMALLER browser? I had to upgrade my memory when I bought WinXP - that's how I knew it was better than the OLD windows. I think Mozilla should concentrate on their browser better, like making the GUI translucent, including the latest version of Flash, and packaging those handy (and FREE!) software packages that speed up your internet connection. For myself, I'll stick with IE - the browser that gets BIGGER all the time, and therefore BETTER.

(remove tongue from cheek)

Re:What's Mozilla On?

[Smidge204]

My home network is comprized entirely of 100-160MHz Pentium machines running Win9x. Phoenix has so far impressed me very much with it's performance and size.

It's nice to see that someone is actually making size and speed a priority rather than an afterthought, and without sacrificing functionality!

So far so good!
=Smidge=

Anti-Aliased Fonts for Phoenix on Linux/i386

[pryan]

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.

Re:just unzipped..

[thing12]

but not stable, unfortunately. it continues to crash on complicated / poorly written pages for me

Examples? Bug Reports?

If you don't tell anyone, it will never get fixed.

Phoenix Technologies makes a web browser

[yerricde]

It's not like these two are competing technologies.

Actually, they are. Phoenix FirstView Connect is a stripped-down web browser. Mozilla.org Phoenix is a stripped-down web browser.

Phoenix is a straight up IE killer

And Phoenix Technologies' product is a straight up Pocket IE killer. So will be Gecko, once the Weenies reduce its footprint.

A sugestion to slashdot.

[jellomizer]

How about creating a new section on slashdot called Software Updates. That way every little version number changed can be published and discussed. (Like with Linux Kernels, OS X Updates, Mozzila and the like updates). This way it has the advantage that more of the smaller updates can be published without taking up the main space and still keeping the discussion on the topic. And this should get rid of a lot of "Why do you post every Minor version change" comments and the like.", It also has the advantage of beeing seen for a longer time on the sub pages.

Mouse Gestures in Phoenix

[skunkeh]

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.

Not faster

[Door-opening Fascist]

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.

Re:Not to be a troll, but

[Phroggy]

Let's get some equal coverage here on this unbiased "news" site called Slashdot

Slashdot has NEVER claimed to be unbiased. From the FAQ:

Personally, I have a pet peeve when people post comments saying things like "That's not News For Nerds!" and "That's not Stuff that Matters!" Slashdot has been running for almost 5 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker on what ends up on the homepage.... We've been running Slashdot for a long time, and if we occasionally want to post something that someone doesn't think is right for Slashdot, well, we're the ones who get to make the call.

If you're not happy about that, you don't have to keep coming back. :-)

Re:multi tab startup

[DarkVein]

Do you remember when the Aqua Mozilla themes were pulled? Apple didn't want skins that LOOKED like Aqua but didn't ACT like Aqua. The real concern was Mozilla on MacOS behaving inconsistently with the GUI it imitates.

Mozilla on MacOS X now has a custom front end, native to Aqua. Chimera is dependant on the Aqua front of Mozilla. If or when Phoenix ports to MacOS X, they and Apple will want Phoenix to have a native Aqua interface.

It's kind of stinky, but it's the best name brand policy both for Apple and Phoenix on MacOS X. However, I agree with you. Phoenix is leagues ahead and above of Mozilla, Chimera, IE5.5:mac, and Omniweb, in order of 0wn4g3. MacOS X needs Phoenix.

Re:Windows/Linux sizes?

[asa]

Just what is it that makes the Linux apps so much bigger (openoffice.org also springs to mind)?

A number of reasons. One reason is that the msvc++ compiler can make a smaller (disk and memory footprint) and faster Phoenix binary than it's linux counterpart.Another reason is that there are code and compatability issues that prevent us from statically compiling more of the linux binary like we do for windows.

--Asa

Re:Not to be a troll, but

[Reziac]

As a further note -- if a story generates the usual array of comments, and if as many as half those comments are in some way related to the article, it must have "mattered" to enough of the people who come here regularly.

After all, you don't have to read what doesn't interest you. Just like you don't have use IE if you don't like it. Even if Phoenix sucks and even if 0.1 releases are meaningless, it's still one more option for folk who don't like other browsers.

(See, I wasn't either off topic. ;)

Re:slashdot front page big fonts?

[DarkVein]

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.