Phoenix 0.3 Is Out

David Tansey writes "The Mozilla-based stripped down browser has now reached binary release 0.3. They are ripping out all the mail and news functions, composer functions, and IRC functions. The point is to work against the 'monolitic' mozilla trunk and make a browser, not a suite. I've noticed that it now uses considerably less memory than Mozilla uses and loads faster. Check it out here."

Is it worth it?

[NightRain]

I don't know. Personally I've never had a problem with Mozilla's load or rendering speed. I mean it could be a smaller install, but I haven't bothered with Phoenix as a seperate, if admittedly smaller installer, doesn't seem worth the hassle Ray

But I *like* those functions...

[TheSHAD0W]

I can see why many people would prefer to get Mozilla's browser apart from all the other junk. But the fact is, I *like* the email client, and web page composer. So I'll keep using the full Mozilla release.

On the other hand, the IRC client could disappear for all I care, and if dumping it would lose some of the bloat, I'd be all for it. Maybe the Mozilla dev team should consider making their product more modular, so components can be excluded.

Finally!

[Erazmus]

Finally something that I can run on my Tuxscreen [tuxscreen.net] telephone. Great job guys!

wow

[g4dget]

And it's "only" a 10Mbyte download. However, I have to say, it does seem more responsive than Mozilla.

K-Meleon

[Anonymous Coward]

The K-Meleon browser for Windows is a Gecko-based browser that uses native Windows widgets and GUI elements.

It has not seen an official update in almost a year, however there has been a quietly released (as in, not even mentioned on the front page) beta build, which you can grab here [sf.net].

It adds new things, including support for 'layers, which is basically the name they've given to tabs.

If you're interested with trying new browser and use Windows, you may want to give it a look.

-- Anonymous Hero

About time

[Anonymous Coward]

It was due out Oct 8, but they delayed it so mozilla 1.2beta will "not suck" Does anyone know whether there are plans to keep the core code of mozilla and phoenix about the same? or will the part roads?

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[e8johan]

Why not having all those functions in separate applications that can be automatically embedded into Mozilla if wanted/needed and otherwise leave them out.

I'd say that all this integration makes we want to go back to text mode only. Apps should have one purpose (for example browsing) otherwise they end up being bloated gigants.

Opera or Phoenix?

[Alex711]

I run a moderate system (Athlon 850 w/ 256 megs of RAM) and I notice a HUGE discrepency in browser load times (esp. mozilla and IE vs Phoeniz and Opera). I initially switched from IE to Mozilla, then to Phoenix, and then tried Opera which has been lightning fast. It appears this version of phoenix may be as fast as Opera (which was infinitely faster than the very nimble phoenix 0.2), though Im not sure.

I think I am going to try this version of phoenix out a bit more and weigh it against Opera to see which is better.

Any comments on which you like better, is faster?

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[nemesisj]

You know what's ironic - that's the way Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together. Then you've got Mozilla chugging around. I used Phoenix and I love it - its really fast and seems stable. Good work guys.

Re:Monolith

[BZ]

The core group is not working on IRC Chat or Composer (except insofar as textareas need to work). IRC Chat was initially done by one person and is now maintained by three people or so.

That's how open source software works. Someone wanted an IRC client? They wrote one. If that's what they want to spend their time on, who's to stop them?

*sigh*

[jukal]

just last week I had a look in the old browser collection. The binary size for Mosaic 0.4 (wintel) was 677 280 bytes. Netscape 1.0 is still around 800 000 bytes. 2.0 was 2.5 megabytes. Quite reasonable. Now, Netscape 2.0 was very mature browser at that time - and it's main goal was not the minimize the bytesize or memory footprint. It's nice to see that there is now serious effort to go back down. Infact, we would be much better of if the browser evolution had been frozen some 3-4 years ago and restarted now that we have this magic XML. (Magic XML, which could make things more efficient, just if most XML things would not be bloated). Same thing happens with everything, feature war - forget brains at home - redesign something elegant - feature war on the new invention - redesign realize that everything is fucked up. *sigh, what a bad day :) *

Re:Is it worth it?

[Exotabe]

Well, what jumps out at me is that, already, Phoenix is taking up 2/3 of the memory that Mozilla does. I just installed the 0.3 release, and it resides in 90M of RAM as opposed to ~140M for Mozilla.

While I like/use some of the extras that Mozilla incorporates, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the progress of Phoenix, because I definitely don't need all of them. The concept of a lightweight browser with the power of Mozilla and more configurability options has a lot of appeal to myself and presumably others. As far as the rendering speed, I don't suspect there would be a noticable difference for anyone, unless they were strapped for RAM. Phoenix is built on the Mozilla core, so both browsers would logically both incorporate the Gecko engine for rendering.

My only other suggestion would be to read the release notes [mozilla.org] for 0.3, they might shed some insight as to why the Phoenix people are doing what they're doing.

Re:Phoenix is cool and all...

[abiogenesis]

From the Phoenix FAQ [mozilla.org]:

1. What can I do to help?

We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!

Using it right now

[Selanit]

. . . and I love it. It's great. I've tried similar projects before -- K-Meleon under Windows, Galeon under Linux -- and neither of them worked as well for me as Phoenix. Besides, K-Meleon's development seems to have stalled, and Galeon requires about a zillion different gnome things before it'll compile, not to mention the whole Mozilla codebase as well.

The ability to customize the interface *easily* is killer. I like having my Home button on the main toolbar, thank you, and getting it there in Mozilla is a serious pain, and requires 1) substituting a whole new theme, or 2) doing some XUL hacking. With Phoenix, you right click, select "Customize," and then you can drag and drop toolbar elements from the available selection. Absolutely terrific.

Oh! And the plugin installation stuff WORKS now. I never could get Java to work in Mozilla without manually copying files around (under windows) or making symlinks (under linux). With Phoenix, it just downloaded, installed itself, and started working. No user intervention required.

That said, it's not perfect. First off, there are a lot of features enabled by default that you can't disable because the preferences menu has been gutted. For example, I prefer to turn off the Password Manager . . . but I can't, unless I feel like opening up the preferences.js file and altering the preferences settings manually. Hopefully this will be remedied in later versions; on general principles, you should retain preferences settings for each feature.

I'm having a hard time coming up with other objections to it. But I'm sure I'll find some. And then I'll submit bugs to Bugzilla. Go you all and do likewise!

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[Dog and Pony]

And as a side note, at least on Windows, Mozilla has been just as fast as IE for ages now. Using QuickStart makes startup instant, although here at work I never bothered switching it on as it starts quickly enough for me anyway.

On *what* Windows I ask? As I always do, as I've used Mozilla for quite some time (exclusively for mail, together with others for browsing), on several boxes, and never seen this happen.

Face it people, Mozilla can never be as fast as IE, partly because IE cheats, and partly because, well the Mozilla UI is slow-rendered. The latter could probably be "fixed", but probably not as long as the otherwise great XUL is used - the win is extremely flexible GUI instead. I tend to think that it is worth the slower UI. But don't say it is as fast as heavily optimized win32 GUI. Duh.

It also gets swapped out long time before memory is full, and boy has it got trouble getting back out of there... is this more Windows cheating? It might be. Don't know. It doesn't hang though... just goes for a very long walk before it comes back.

QuickStart helps. Not more, not less. It helps. No instant starts there, even on my AMD XP 1800 with 512 MB meory and nothing else running, IE beats it easily. IE beats it easily on every machine I've tried, ranging from 300 Mhz to around 1500 Mhz, with memory varying from 128-512 MB most oftenly.

So what is this magic machine that makes Mozilla as fast as IE? What Windows? Oh, maybe it is 3.1 on an old 386? That would probably make it hard to tell the difference...

Now, instead of running around pretending as if our favourite browser is already as fast and as good as the competition, how about we open our eyes and make that happen for real instead?

Maybe that would make "normal" people take us seriously, for starters. They don't when they clearly see the lies.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[heideggier]

Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together

err no, Microsoft just pile everything into the OS and load the apps up when windows boots (for example IE) they get away with this because they have a monopoly on a closed API. If you don't what to run IE then you are very hard pressed to remove it. I think even Office uses libaries which are installed as part of the OS. If you did a direct shot out between moz and IE and Microsoft product would look decidly bloated. Since this is slashdot someone will point this out.

The question is "Is this such a bad thing?" KDE seems to do much the same thing on linux, but in a open manner, modular code does seem to work very well, although the linux kernel still seems very monolythic in nature compared to somthing like mach

. However I think what people "mean" when they say "small tools doing simple things very well" in the unix philosophy is something along the lines of grep | sort | more > results &&. For example imagine if instead of one hugh program you had a menu and just loaded menu items into that menu while displaying output windows, with programs just being scripts to tie all those things up, and I think from that stand point Mozilla with XUL seems closer to that ideal.

The Problem seems to be that no one has decided on a framework, and people went mad on OOP's type paradigms causing all the softwear bloat problems we have today,

My thoughts on Phoenix 0.3

[Compact Dick]

I have been running this browser since I first heard of it, when Slashdot announced 0.1's release. Since then, I have been avidly using it alongside Moz nightlies and Opera 6.05. Put succinctly, Phoenix rocks. It's Mozilla minus a lot of the lard.

Reasons why I like it:

• Speed: Phoenix loads in around 2-5 secs on my PII 366M w/128 MB RAM. Mozilla takes a leisurely 20-30 seconds. Hmmm...
• Standards compliance: Since Phoenix has the same Gecko rendering engine from Moz, I am assured that it renders properly-coded sites very well [extensive support for CSS2 and DOM helps here]. This vastly improves rendering times [more on that later]. Lesser sites still come out quite proper with its Quirks rendering mode.
• Rendering speed: It may not be evident to Moz users on slower machines, but Gecko can be blazingly fast given the right environment. Phoenix is fscking fast. Just as fast as IE, if not faster. Only Opera can claim to do one better, especially loading pages from cache. Opera is truly King in this arena.
• Excellent XUL implementation: Phoenix has shown that XUL can be a viable alternative to using native widgets. Try it for yourself - it's much more responsive and fluid. And the customisable toolbar is a real treat. Worth downloading it for that feature alone. Hopefully Mozilla will pick up a few pointers here and merge them into its own codebase.
• Satchel: a replacement for Moz's form manager, it works in a manner similar to IE, which IMO is more usable. Plus, Satchel is intended as a full replacement for the older, "bloated" form manager and eventually will cut down installer size and boost speed. One more boon for Mozilla.
• Peace of mind: I refuse to use IE online for reasons of privacy. I do not know what it does with the info it gathers while one uses it. I have no idea if there are backdoors in it. Ad-aware detects at least one spyware component [Alexa] in default installs of IE 5.x and 6.0. The recent Sendmail and OpenSS? exploits notwithstanding, I feel much more comfortable using an open-source program when connected to the net.

Also try some of Phoenix's extensions [mozilla.org]. Highly recommended for tab lovers are the tabbed browsing extensions - so handy and sensible it should be part of the default install.

Now go to the website, get it [mozilla.org] and have fun - I know you will :-)

another approach?

[tanveer1979]

Wouldnt it be better if instead of stripping these things, they would make them availale as modules. While installation, the user can disable the modules he dosent want. So you have speed and ppl who want mail and news have that too.

Re:Monolith

[jejones]

OK. If one does that, what happens when one clicks on a mailto: link? Can it be configured to start one's favorite mailer?

Re:block images from this server

[Lars Arvestad]

By right-clicking on an image, you can select "block images from this server" and further images will not be loaded from this site, saving you annoying advertisements and download-times.

This feature is already in Mozilla. I believe I have used it at least from 1.0.

mozilla and evolution

[roalt]

I would really like to have mozilla work with evolution somewhat better. Any tips out there for it?

Debian?

[tconnors]

Hmm, I'm tracking unstable, and keep periodicly trying apt-get install phoenix, but it still aint there. Is anyone working on this one? Of course, I am perfectly happy with galeon (I will never need to touch mozilla again. Yay!), but is perhaps phoenix even smaller?

Re:But I *like* those functions...

[spongman]

funnily enough OE was originally written as a shell extension designed to be embedded into the explorer namespace (under My Computer somewhere), but I don't think that idea ever made it beyond the developers' machines.

What lies?

[Per Abrahamsen]

I'm posting this with Mozilla 1.2a from 200 MHz Pentium II with 64Mb ram and Windows 98. Mozilla is so fast that additional benefits would not help. It may or may not be faster than MSIE, both react subjectively "immidately", so I don't really care. I do have QuickLaunch enabled, but since I only start Mozilla once (after boot) anyway, it doesn't really matter.

Of course, swapping between large applications is slow, but apart from the browser the only applications I run is an X server and some ssh connections (it is basically an X terminal), and apparently they all fit within the 64Mb, so for normal use it is fine.

But I don't call you a liar for stating that Mozilla feels slow to you. You may have another usage pattern where MSIE feel faster.

This is what I need!

[den_erpel]

Whoooohoooo!

Since I am using:
mutt for mail
slrn for usenet
bitchx for chat

phoenix is exactly what I need for browsing! _and_ it is still Mozilla. Let's fire up alien
$ tar cvfz phoenix-20021016.tar.gz /usr/lib/phoenix /usr/bin/phoenix
$ fakeroot alien phoenix-20021016.tar.gz

Yeah, I know, I should build it from the mozilla CVS, but I'm in a hurry here >:)

Re:Here's why I won't use it

[Jugalator]

I'm using Phoenix 0.3 on Windows right now. Never touched any settings.

- Airmiles loads just fine, including front page. I browsed the site and everything looked to be in order.

- Don't know about Hotmail since I don't have a Hotmail account. Go figure... :-) But how does it not allow you to login? It gave me a friendly "please re-enter your password" when I typed in some bogus info. Does it do that for you, or does something else happen?

- You should tell IGN to see what's the problem with Mozilla-based browsers. Sounds like it wouldn't need a tremendous amount of effort to fix.

- I don't know the procedure, but you should send your employers self serve site to the Mozilla team (try posting it to an appropriate mozilla newsgroup on Google Groups for example - I think they have a public news server at news.mozilla.org as well) so they can look into it. Since the source view shows its almost entirely made of Javascript code, it wouldn't be surprising if they program IE-style with document.all and god knows what. But it could be something else like a bug in Mozilla's rendering engine. Why not notify them to help?

Re:Testing it out now

[oojah]

Although not on topic, you should check out Directory Opus from GPSoftware - http://www.gpsoft.com.au It's an Explorer replacement and is truely good. There is more configurability than you can wave a stick at. Trust me, it's great :)

Cheers,

Roger

Re:block images from this server

[acoustiq]

Maybe phoenix can include a feature that blocks images from a URL containing the text "adlog.pl" ?

When will you guys learn? The BeOS has done this for years! NetPositive filters ads [betips.net] by text matching, not by domain.

And BeOS is not dead!!

Re:moderate

[rseuhs]

Check this out:

-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 10850305 Sep 24 17:41 phoenix-0.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--&n bsp; 1 user users 10328269 Oct 3 14:16 phoenix-0.2-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
-rw-------&n bsp; 1 user users 9520231 Oct 15 18:32 phoenix-0.3-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Phoenix is becoming smaller (and faster) which each release!

Results of my brief comparisons

[purrpurrpussy]

And they had better be optimising for speed!

I downloaded it straight away to have a look and apart from not rendering tables the same way as IE (something to do with pixel positioning and sizing - probly my fault) I notices it is not that fast.

A brief comparison of a little demo I did (www.freshbrains.co.uk) - this is a bunch of simple transparent sprites boinging around) shows that IE6 is about 2 to 2.5 times faster than Phoenix (which I assmue is the Gecko core).

Still a way to go! But yer gettin there!

Wow

[Panoramix]

That being said, I'm fetching Phoenix right now. Lets see how it fares against Galeon...

I'm dumping Galeon. At least for a while.

Render is noticeably faster, and the UI feels as fast as GTK. Can't believe this thing is XUL. Amazing.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[BurritoWarrior]

If you do a custom install of Mozilla instead of typical or everything, you can deselect everything except "Navigator".

Even then it is too big of a footprint/resource hog (IMO), but at least you don't have the extras you speak of.

Re:Interaction, not Merging

[rapidweather]

I use Phoenix 0.3 on Windows and Linux, and it's great. Very few bugs.
Easy to uninstall prior to upgrade on Linux, just delete the directory, keep your shortcuts to it, when the new one is downloaded and gunzipped, tar -xvf'd you are ready to go, no "install.sh" to run. your preferences are still there in your user directory, so your toolbar comes up as you had it.
The popup blocking is on by default, so you get the benefit of it right away.

Re:Results of my brief comparisons

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be probably caused by javascript you used.

But try this page [mozilla.org]...

Re:What lies?

[Anonymous Coward]

I once tried Mozilla with win98 lite (with msie eradicated, 95ish explorer and the like). The whole system was very fast, and Mozilla launch felt like notepad. Try it for yourself sometimes...

Re:block images from this server

[Fweeky]

I managed to replace the slashdot advertisements inside a story with blank space, but removing the top-banner page will also remove all your other slashdot graphics. Maybe phoenix can include a feature that blocks images from a URL containing the text "adlog.pl" ?

In your user CSS file:

a img[width="468"][height="60"] {
display: none;
}

Repeat for all common advert sizes you see.

Alternatively, use mine [aagh.net]. Goes for Opera users too, although it will still load the banners; it just won't display them.

Re:Is it worth it?

[OSSturi]

I don't want an email program, a news reader, an HTML editor, a chat program or an IM client with my browser.

MailNews, Composer, the IRC-client, Debugger and Inspector are modules which you can install after installing only the browser. They're xpis. Just download the bare installer (mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-installer.tar.gz or the equivalent, 256 KB as of today) and choose to install *only* the browser. This will simply download the xpi for the browser. If you want to browse secure sites, install the personal security manager along with it.

Phoenix is more a new version of just the browser part regarding the customizeability of the UI and a few rewritten features.

works for me

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

I'm a convert. Yes, there are still some bugs. For example, it still has some problems with searches within forms ... well with forms in general. But considering they have a build just about every night I suspect it isn't long before this problem is solved.

Certainly I love the lean speed of it, but I also can't believe how I lived without tabbed browsing up until now (I know other browsers have it, but I didn't). There are alot of other little features I like - such as fun with the mouse wheel and fonts, the recently revised bookmark system. But mostly I like that it keeps them nasty pop-ups at bay. Reading the NY Times and WAPO are no longer a pain (or as painful).

That said, I wonder if they can keep this level of energy up. I hope they do. And I hope they can do it without bloating the product.

Once they get this bad-boy un-bugged, I'm getting all my lame users at various charities I do free stuff for to upgrade from their pre W3C beasts. The install, use and system suckage is very, very reasonable - especially considering the price.