Mozilla Jumps on 'Lean Browser' Bandwagon 675
fader writes "Following in the footsteps of fast (and often fantastic) wrappers around Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine), Mozilla has just released their own lightweight browser, Phoenix. Only Phoenix will still use XUL, the cross-platform markup language used for the current Mozilla interface. Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?"
Gripe (Score:5, Insightful)
Step in the right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Compliance with the relevant standards means nothing to Mr. Average, he just wants his browser to open quick and render faster to get to his pr0n.
Remember past mistakes please (Score:3, Insightful)
I know they must be under pressure to add features; someone is paying their wages. But increasingly there are important bugs that just aren't being fixed. Please learn from the past, it may look like a time saver, but it costs more than it is worth in the long run.
Only for x86??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Light Weight (Score:4, Insightful)
precompiled XUL? (Score:2, Insightful)
If not, then wouldn't that be a good idea to cut down on the slowness? The issue with XUL as far as its benefits go are great. However, I don't think you need to interpret every time it starts. It should only check for changes. As far as rendering goes, I have noticed that the rendering seems to do too much at once. Perhaps if it took a more prioritized approach and rendered the underlying layout first, then text then media (for example) as well as allowed for the user or site author to prioritize more specifically then this slowness could at least be tolerated. an example of this would be a instructional site with graphical examples interspersed within the text. Personally I would like to see the text first. In fact, what if the site author used CSS (or XSL) stylesheets and had some for lower bandwidth or lower processing computers like handhelds. I sure would like the ability to set my browser preferences to (per site) use the text only (or low res pic I suppose) version of the stylesheet while still downloading the other crap in the background. Perhaps I could even set a preference to have it ask me when it was done pulling to re-render with the new stuff (instead of shaking the screen aroudn everytime a new pic is brought up causing me to feel like someone in an earthquake.
I am impressed with the features that Mozilla offers (and hope people start exposing more features that the reference mozilla browser did not).
Slow at what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slow at what?
I agree that under Linux mozilla takes forever to come up.
Under OS X its worse.
But under Windows, if allowed to load itself into memory pre-launch (which IE does. Only fair to let Mozilla do it as well) it is as fast or faster than IE.
But as far as rendering, mozilla on my computers tends to be quicker than other browsers I've tried. Under OS X, mozilla (once its loaded
nice (Score:1, Insightful)
I've had enough of shits like you (Score:0, Insightful)
Really, people like yourself really fuck me off. You jump on someone as soon as they complain, with a corus of "Why don't you fix it?" and "Fix it yourself!", as though everyone else in the world has a whole bunch of spare time to examine, understand and fix the code for your little pet project. Yeah, thats the one.
Get of your god damn high horse. When was the last time you did something that directly benefited the Open Source community? I mean, apart from imparting your insightful wisdows like "So why are you griping about this, instead of doing something else more interesting?" Why arn't you doing something more interesting?
Re:mozilla slow? (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed - that and the javascript preferences (no unrequested windows and no messing with the status bar text)
However it's not just the speed, it's the mammoth amount of memory it hogs aswell. I'm all for a smaller browser. Ditch the composer, the mail client & address book.. I might be switching to phoenix if they can keep the size down.
Re:Gripe (Score:3, Insightful)
At least Mozilla tries to fit in. If you run it in Classic mode Mozilla looks and behaves much like any other Win32 application. On XP, it even renders widgets with the theme engine.
As for keyboard shortcuts, Mozilla shares a large set of shortcuts with IE (e.g. cut, copy, paste, find, new window etc.), but if you're a power user the mind boggles why you'd want to use IE anyway. Mozilla has considerably more keyboard shortcuts (and shock horror) some of them are indispensible such as being able to Find Next by hitting Ctrl+G. Why IE doesn't have a Find Next shortcut is a total mystery to me. Outlook Express is particularly hopeless when it comes to shortcuts.
Re:I recently "made the switch" (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it would. MS put these things in to make you say that, to make you WANT the standard to be given over to them and force everyone else to play catch-up with IE.
It has to be resisted or there's no hope for quality software and sometimes that can be anoying or inconvienient but that's the price of not letting Bill decide where you want to go to today.
TWW
Mozilla's Biggest Problem -- Poor Branding. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's stuff has been just great for along time. The Mozilla group should just focus on making their HTML rendering engine, Gecko, completely useable by as many application developers as possible... for example a wxWindows binding would be a great boon.
And what's this with changing the icons? Either it's a Dragon, Sea-Monkey, a big M, or a Square thingy that is hald blue and half read. I've got four icons on my page for the same thing...
In short... Mozilla needs some marketing oriented types instead of more nerds. For example, it needs help making Chatzilla work for people like my gf who can use AIM but get confused when chatzilla doesn't find a server and complains.
Re:I recently "made the switch" (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't comment on most of your points as they do not affect me on linux in general (I usually use konqueror unless I come across a website that konqueror just wont display/open, then I go to mozilla). One thing that I will comment on is memory usage gripes. It is in no way a simple thing to compare mozilla mem usage vs that of IE on a windoze box. Why? Because a significant portion of IE is (unnecessarily) in the core OS and is ALWAYS in memory on a windoze box. Thus, when you start IE proper, your mem usage will go up but not that much because a lot of it is already resident (part of the reason that IE SEEMS so fast vs other browsers sometimes). You pay for IE mem usage at initial windoze bootup, with its unneeded files going into mem from the beginning - giving you an illusion that IE, the app itself, is faster than many other alternatives.
If parts of mozilla's core libs could be loaded at bootup on windoze then you would see a real speedy mozilla browser too.
Oh, one more comment...it would be wrong in general and wrongheaded period to poison html standards with windoze-specific pollution of html. It is not the responsibility of browser builders to support M$ poisoning of widely accepted and correct standards with M$-specific crap code, nay, it is the web designer's responsibility to KNOW XTML and HTML well enough to actually avoid propriatory and exclusionary and useless extra coding and tagging in their web design. If an electrician installs incorrect plug outlets in your house such that you find you cannot plug in most of your appliances, you do not blame the appliance manufacturer for not going along with the spec of one standards-flaunting electrician. You demand that the electrician use install proper outlets so that all your appliances will plug in to any outlet.
Most web designers are morons. They don't know squat about what they are doing and don't think diddle about their users. They just toss something together thinking that it will work as they want it to but instead are loading their site with nonstandard crap tags that break their site for standards-obeying browsers. It is their responsibility to code properly, not the browser creator's responsibility to accomodate stupid, erroneous web design.
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Until Mozilla gets its updates in the form of patches, it'll never be accepted outside the IT community. You simply can't tell the average user that the only way to upgrade a product is to completely erase their old installation and download a new 50 meg version.
We patched a security hole, erase and reinstall.
We added 10K of new features, DL the entire thing all over again.
Ignore for the moment the hassle involved even for someone who knows what they're doing. The avergae user won't even attempt this because they'd be afraid of losing all their email, bookmarks, etc. The FAQ even states that you have to recreate your account with each new version.
Forget playing around with brand new browsers. The old one won't become widespread until people can patch it with the same ease as any other program.
8+ MB is small??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Gripe (Score:2, Insightful)
Why oh why can't I change tabs without the mouse? Where are the tabbed keyboard shortcuts?
You know, Ctrl-Tab!
Re:Skinned Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it may be possible if, instead of "widgets", people would come up with some "drawing" code. Some elements are pretty consistent: "draw a raised box", "draw a raised box I can press", "draw it pressed", etc. Then maybe systems could use it, most toolkits have calls like this inside them. Then again, even at this level I worry about a complexity and forced design, for instance the obvious implementations would not let you make non-square widgets, while a non-square one would be complex and could be rightly claimed to be too much overhead.
Also NONE of this has anything to do with enforcing consistent shortcuts between applications. From a programming point of view it is impossible. Imagine that they said Ctrl+C will ALWAYS do "cut". Then they say you must write a program with the function cut() and Ctrl+C will call that and you cannot do anything about it. That is what enforcing a consistent set of shortcuts means (Ignore the fact that you could make cut() do anything you wanted, I'm not assumming malicious programmers here). Imagine now you make up a new function, blorg, and you want Ctrl+E to call it. They know nothing about blorg so they cannot possibly call it. Okay, perhaps there is an interface that says "make Ctrl+E call blorg()". Great but what happens when they decide that Ctrl+E means a new standard (say go-to-end-of-line). Does your program stop working in that Ctrl+E stops calling blorg()? What if you relied on this fact? Or does Ctrl+E still call blorg()? Then you have an inconsistent user interface!
The fact is that ALL systems allow the shortcuts to be arbitrarily arranged. The fact is that programs, especially on Windows, are consistent is because the programmers have an incentive to make them consistent. This incentive is always ignored by the people who keep yelling for "single toolkit".
Re:Light Weight (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, Phoenix download for windows is about 8.4 MB. Mozilla download for Windows is about 11MB, IE6 typical download for win2K is 17MB. Phoenix is by no means the biggest of that group. Opera is to be praised for it's small download size. I just wish they had the same level of support for other W3C standards as they do for CSS.
--Asa
Stupid to change the name (Score:1, Insightful)
Get a clue moz people!
Re:Skinned Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the major points about web standards is that a page isn't supposed to look exactly the same regardless of the software used to display it. HTML is not supposed to control presentation. CSS is itself only supposed to be a guide. The sooner we can abandon the obsession with controlling every last pixel the better.
No way! XUL is AWESOME! (Score:3, Insightful)
XUL makes it possible to quickly develop cross-platform applications that load like web pages but look like "regular" desktop apps.
That's great news. I for one am tired of using applications that are done with just HTML. It's not what HTML is designed for, and we need something better. XUL provides that.
It's also a potent weapon we can use against IE. I'm convinced that we're in a very dangerous situation right now. If Microsoft can get some of the bigger sites to only work with IE, you can kiss goodbye all hopes for competition in the web browser and operating system market. With its current market share, we're dangerously close to that level. The solution, of course, is to get people to use Mozilla!
And why would end users care about switching to Mozilla? APPLICATIONS!
For this reason, I advocate doing new Web development work in XUL instead of HTML. Not only does it look MUCH nicer than traditional web apps, but it will give people a reason to switch to Mozilla.
I'm currently inhaling O'Reilly's new Mozilla application book [mozdev.org]. It's available under an Open Content license. (I submitted this as a story to Slashdot but they rejected it!!! Why??? This is HUGE!) The book is a good one and it can really show you what Mozilla is capable of. It is a very slick environment. Please check it out!
One-UI mind (Score:4, Insightful)
For the life of me I can't understand why people can't handle remembering/using more than one user interface. Are software developers going to have to make everything plain vanilla just so brain-dead web surfers can use their product?
Turn on your brains while you use your computers, folks and take the 5 minutes to learn a new user interface. Maybe you'll see something you like better (like tabbed browsing) that's not available on your interface. Maybe you'll appreciate your "primary" interface more. If anything, it keeps your brain moving and the progressive evolution to better software going!
Ryan