Phoenix 0.4 Released 480
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."
Missing the most important feature... (Score:2)
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:3, Informative)
The toolbar has its bright sides. (Score:2)
The "Move up one level" is the button that browsers has lacked for years. It is amazing that this isn't in all of them.
This display of the search words, clickable so you can searh the document for the mtaches without bringing up an unfriendly search box that doesn't wrap the search. And highlighting of the words, too.
"Search this site"-button.
History (clearable, if you are worried about someone seeing your searches for pr0n
And if I understand this correctly, you can choose to help google with their data by letting them "spy" on your searches. Before anyone cries out, go try install it and see the size of those warnings, the privacy statements, and realize that it is something they ask you to do if you wish. You don't have to. I have this turned on.
Some of this is stuff that browsers should already have without plugins. If I could choose, it'd have em all.
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's an excellent concept
Yuioup
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:5, Informative)
You get one built in and you can populate it with about 150 additional search engines by going to mozdev.org [mozdev.org] and installing additional mycroft plugins (they're very tiny, give it a try).
--Asa
Googlebar for Mozilla/Netscape 7 (Score:5, Informative)
I tried it on Phoenix 0.2 and it worked. Not sure if it will on the newer versions. I heard there are problems with installing it on certain platforms as well.
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:3, Informative)
apt-get install googlizer
or
http://packages.debian.org/googliz
Slight modification to make it work for everything2 compliments it well.
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:2, Insightful)
Screw the Google toolbar - I'm helpless without multiple search engines, and that's what bookmark keywords are for. (I type "g something" and it searches google for that, "e2 something" to go to node at everything2, "imdb something" to search iMDB, and so on...)
Not sure if this feature is in Phoenix, but Mozilla has it.
And I'm sure there's a Mozilla/Phoenix toolbar .xpi somewhere for this if you absolutely insist, but I think bookmark keywords rule.
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:5, Insightful)
How to make a keyword search? Simple!
Search for a word on google (or any other search engine). Our word ="xyzzy".
When you get the results, add the resulting page as a bookmark.
Open "Manage bookmarks". Open properties of your new Google bookmark. The Location will look something like:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xyzzy
Now replace "xyzzy" in your bookmark with "%s". The result should look something like:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s
Now you just add your keyword in the bookmark/properties field saying "Keyword:". We put "g" there.
Done! Click OK.
Now you can search google for xyzzy by entering "g xyzzy" in your location field.
This works in both Mozilla 1.1+ and Phoenix 0.3+. It might even work in earlier versions.
Re:Missing the most important feature... (Score:2, Interesting)
Speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:2, Informative)
I like Phoenix a lot - it's going to be my main browser pretty soon if it keeps going the way it's going. However, there *are* faster browsers out there, Opera for one. Dillo is probably the fastest browser in the universe, you really have to see it to believe it.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Speed? (Score:5, Informative)
--Asa
Re:Speed? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, they're adding features and performance together. Phoenix is getting smaller, faster and more featureful all at the same time.
--Asa
Re:Speed? (Score:4, Funny)
So, if we follow this reasoning, pretty soon now Phoenix will shrink to zero size, infinite performance, and have all possible features.
-Steve
The way things are going... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The way things are going... (Score:3, Informative)
*************
17. "Phoenix is getting bloated. I knew it would happen."
Phoenix is not getting bloated. Its download size is going down, for one thing. As stated earlier, the time to do the heavy lifting, feature work and redesign is early in the development cycle. That's where we are now -- this is 0.4, folks!
We're working hard to improve our support for extensions to reduce bloat. Without extensions support, we'd be pressured to include the add-ons in the default build.
Convince Me (Score:4, Interesting)
(Because it is Microsoft is not a valid answer)
What makes Phoenix so cool that I should bother with it?
Compare things like features, security, and resource usage.
Try it yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
What I can tellyou is that no matter what anyone tells you about a browser, you won't be able to really appreciate what makes it great without trying it yourself.
Russ
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
That said, I'm typing this on ie on OS X. I also use ie on my windows box. I use it 'cause it works, mostly. One interesting place it doesn't work (at least on os X) is a link [entropymine.com] I discovered last night. It's a test page for png files. Instant segfault, heh.
Re: Convince Me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Convince Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I cannot use IE anymore because I am so accustomed to this feature.
Re:Convince Me (Score:2, Interesting)
I bet IE will never implement this.
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
I use CrazyBrowser [crazybrowser.com] which is just the IE engine with tabbed browsing, pop up killer and a number of other useful things.
I actually prefer the way it does pop-ups too, they go into a new tab rather than actually popping up. Makes it much easier to kill them (as you can just double click on the tab). I don't think Moz does this (or if it does, I didn't find it).
My only complaint is that some (Microsoft) applications insist on firing up IE despite the fact that CrazyBrowser is my default browser.
Oh yes, and it's a silly name.
There is also a commercial version called Netcaptor [netcaptor.com] too which has a few more features, but CB is free (as in beer).
Re:Convince Me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
Re:Convince Me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Convince Me (Score:2, Interesting)
Other cant-live-without-it features include:
A 3rd mouse buttons click opens a link in a new TAB. Very handy.
The tabs have the icon from this site on it. Cool!
Download manager. Much more useful for tracking downloads than IE's....nothing.
Skins are nice. I know you can skin IE with windowblinds and the like but this is no 3rd party software to (possibly) mess up and slow down your system.
I could go on and on about the subtle improvements that made me swear off IE. Im no fan of M$ but even if Mozilla (or phoenix) was made by THEM I would prefer it over IE simply due to the many added useful features.
some simple reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
2.Free. Well since you bought win, it dosent apply maybe
3.Popup Blocking. If you say it dosent annoy you to have popups i think you are lying. I know you will say that third party programs are available, but many of those programs have spyware.
4. Security -> This was your question right? Well mozilla also may have some security issues, but going by record IE security issues have been far more alarming.
5. Conscience-> We all have one. I think you also do
6. Cool ness -> you gf comes and sees the dragon, my o my after boring netscape and IE logos you will show people u use the cool new browser.
7. Ego kick -> ever tried compiling a tough to compile software and see it run. I did kde 3.0beta, that to on solaris with most libraries missing. was real pain... but when it worked the ego kick was great. IE cant even come close to it.
Re:some simple reasons (Score:2)
Actually, the really scary part is that the EULA can change anytime and that Microsoft will take your system as hostage to push DRM down user's throat.
I don't think Microsoft will offer any non-DRM patches very long. (That is patches that don't require DRM being already installed and don't contain DRM)
Re:Convince Me (Score:5, Informative)
You'd switch because Phoenix has a better feature set. Phoenix makes the web enjoyable again by sparing you from pop-ups and giving you tabbed browsing for a much more organized browsing experience. You'd switch because you're concerned about people using IE to steal your files or execute arbitrary code on your machine. You'd switch because Phoenix is an easy migration. You'd switch because Phoenix works and there's just something "right" about using a free and open solution especially one that works well.
--Asa
Re:Convince Me (Score:4, Informative)
You mention part of the problem yourself. In the Task Bar, Windows put all windows that it has opened, while the Phoenix/Mozilla tabs only contain actual web pages. Microsoft tried to fix this slight mess in Windows XP by grouping the tabs by task, but even with this feature turned on, you first need to find the Phoenix tab among the sometimes rather large amount of tasks, then click on it and then look up the web page you wished to access in the sub menu that pop up.
Navigating through your tasks with Alt-Tab also becomes a hassle since there are usually so many tasks active -- much easier to navigate with Ctrl-Tab / PgUp / PgDown in Phoenix to switch between the open web pages only (what you intended to do in the first place).
And, as the Anonymous Coward mentioned, Phoenix also allow you to save and restore groups of tabs.
Re:Convince Me (Score:5, Informative)
1) Fast startup time
2) Tabbed browsing
3) Radial Context menus (Optimoz component)
4) Mouse Gestures (Optimoz component)
5) Popup blocking and *whitelists*
6) Finegrained control over Javascript
7) Sherlock plugins (using Mycroft)
8) Preferences toolbar extension (remove fonts, colors, images, disable javascript, change useragent on the fly, etc.)
9) Extensive toolbar customization
10) Download manager
11) Better security than IE
12) Gecko rendering engine is more DOM-compliant
The only thing missing that I need is cookie blacklists. But IE doesn't have that either.
Re:Convince Me (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, really? [nildram.co.uk] Looks like it has blacklists and whitelists. Although you can see I don't bother with them.
re: cookies (Score:2)
In any event, it would be unfair to pit the newest Phoenix against an older IE version, so I concede that point. Also, I would like to add that I just installed Phoenix 0.4 and it does have cookie white/blacklists now. I'm satisfied.
Re: cookies (Score:2, Informative)
If you want privacy, it's worth upgrading for that alone (plus all the exploit fixes). Then Tools:Internet Options:Privacy and you're free to play.
Re: whitelist (Score:5, Informative)
In Phoenix, when a site attempts to launch a popup window, an icon shows up on the bottom. When clicked, the site can be whitelisted.
Re:Convince Me (Score:5, Informative)
First off, tabs, greatest thing on earth. Run one copy of Phoenix, view as many pages as you want. And with
Secondly, resources. My pc (mind you it's an old p2 300 with 416 megs of RAM) used to slowly go down to almost no resources until I had to reboot, now since I switched to phoenix (no other changes) I live in the 40+% range (usually 50+).
Third, as someone else said but can't be reiterated enough, popup killing, as well as ad image blocking. Wonderful tools in the horrible overjavascripted web of today
fourth, speed. It seems to flow a lot faster for me then IE... probably in the seconds range, which in many instances even on a modem like I'm on, can be a LOT.
All in all, phoenix is just a solid piece of software that has nowhere to go but up.
tabs as a temporary advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
They are cool. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that IE7 has them.
Re:tabs as a temporary advantage (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
Why I won't switch from IE (yet). (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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. [adsubtract.com] 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 [simpli.biz] 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). (Score:5, Informative)
Google toolbar fir IE is nice. I prefer Phoenix's search field with about 15 search engines (from mycroft.mozdev.org) including google groups, news and images. It has a nifty find in page feature too (but that's as useful as the "highlight" bookmarklet that actually styles every instance of the term on the page like google cache does).
Phoenix (the topic of this discussion is Phoenix, not Mozilla) has a UI that's a lot snappier than Mozilla.
Edit coming soon (use the system default editor).
You should give it a try. It's a 7MB download. You just unzip it and double-click on the Phoenix app icon. If you don't like it then drag the folder to the trash.
--Asa
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet). (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
Google toolbar for Mozilla (Score:2)
I don't know what Phoenix has built in, but a Google Toolbar clone for Mozilla is available here [mozdev.org].
From the web page: The Googlebar project was initially created to address the widespread desire in the mozilla community for the Google toolbar to support Netscape 7/Mozilla [...]. Our current release emulates all of the basic search functionality of the toolbar
Judging from the screenshots [mozdev.org] they look quite similar.
MIME types (Score:3, Informative)
Use the damn built-in Windows MIME types!
Often, this is because of a misconfigured web server installation that doesn't recognize the .zip extension and send the application/zip media type. It may send the older media type application/x-zip-compressed or the generic application/octet-stream; Windows doesn't find an association for either of those types.
On the other hand, IE will sometimes ignore the media type and use the file's extension instead. This is part of what led to the <iframe> vulnerability, which Nimda and Klez exploited
Try the IE Skin (Score:3, Interesting)
http://mozillako.hypermart.net/ieskin/ [hypermart.net]
After installing it, you'll be surprised at how much "faster" mozilla seems.
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet). (Score:3, Informative)
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow.
Excercise more. They "feel" fine to me. Mozilla is only slow for me on bringing up some of the dialogs and windows, everything else is just as speedy if not speedier than IE especially in the stable builds.
2. Google toolbar.
This answer probably won't satisfy you, but I personally hate extraneous toolbars. For a normal google search, I type my query into the address bar and an entry pops up in the combo box that lets me run a Google search on that string. For everything else, there's bookmark keywords. For an image query, I set up the appropriate bookmark, type into the address bar something like "img foo" and a Google page of images matching "foo" comes up. Likewise, I have mine set up that "fm" searches freshmeat and "bug" queries the Mozilla bugzilla database.
As far as the Mozdev Googlebar itself goes, you might want to take another look. They're constantly tweaking the thing and it wouldn't surprise me if your features are there already. I'm downloading it now, but I don't want to jeopardize this session by installing it right this second.
3.Edit button.
Mozilla comes with its very own web authoring component called Composer. Click on File --> Edit Page and you're there. Source is one more click away.
If it's web developement you're looking for, you're in luck as Mozilla specifically caters to web developers. Composer is a good WYSIWYG editor with the option of playing with the source whenever you please. Mozilla also comes with a handy DOM inspector and indispensible javascript debugger. Just about the only thing it lacks is a built-in HTML validator and it wouldn't surprise me too much if there were someone working on adding one.
4.View Partial Source.
Mozilla's got it. No add-on needed. Highlight what you want, right click, select View Selection Source.
I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page.
View --> Page Info, click on Media tab. Voila, a list of all images/icons/whatever that the page loads inline. Page Info also reveals all kinds of other stuff including, but not limited to, meta tags, header info, form components, links, and security.
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract.
If AdSubtract is a filtering proxy, I suspect you can use it with Mozilla just fine. If not, there are other solutions that work just as well. I personally install Junkbuster (now Privoxy) on my gateway machine and have all web browsers proxy through that. Works extremely well for me.
Here's my page [simpli.biz] 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'm sure it's a fine program, but it's third party software. It didn't come with IE, so why do you expect Mozilla to come with that kind of functionality? Mozilla might not have the flexibility of AdSubtract but then neither does IE. While Mozilla can give you some control over cookies and ads, I don't use them. I use a third-party program, Junkbuster, which is compatible with every web browser that can connect to a proxy.
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.
I've responded to almost all of your feature requests with, "yes, Mozilla can do that." Perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate your opinions, both on IE and Mozilla. I've been using Mozilla full-time for at least 2 years now (long before it was stable, anyway) and haven't looked back since.
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
Ok I will.... Features... Pop up blocking in it's self is one feature that has switched at least 30 people at work from IE to Mozilla.. I'm going to switch them to Pheonix when it hit's 1.0.
Security? simple... you dont get the GAPING security holes that are built into the IE engine that is now a part of the OS. If your browser is a seperate app it cant be used for an attack as easily as IE is daily.
Resource useage? Well Phoenix is 50% smaller, uses about 30% less ram and is much faster (discount the fact that IE is always loaded into ram and ready, actually no... count that... then the memory useage drop will be even larger.)
Faster, more secure, and features you will never get from Microsoft...
what more do you want? it wrapped in gold foil with a cookie?
That durned irritating butterfly. (Score:2)
I volunteered, mainly because they were desperate.
I got the program running and I fired up their brower to set up their homepage and favorites. I went to a favorite site (I forget which one) and while I was reading an article the screen went black and a large MSN butterfly flew around. It was so jarring that I yelled out the expanded phrase commonly shortened to "WTF?!?".
My friend said "Oh, that happens all the time". I looked at him and said "Not with Mozilla". Apparently there are many popups and ads that appear when you use IE. With Mozilla I'm browsing like it's 1999.
I was going to d/l Mozilla for them and set it up as their default browser, but I still had to fix Outlook for them and, frankly, I was irritated at them for not following my recommendation and buying an iMac. Had they bought an iMac, I wouldn't even need to be there.
Re:Convince Me (Score:2)
I didn't realise they'd released the new rendering engine yet. Tell me, what's its DOM support like? I hope its better than Opera 6s.
Oooh I am so excited... (Score:4, Funny)
cvs-notify mailing list so that the editors
don't have to work so hard?
Phoenix is great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Phoenix is great (Score:4, Funny)
Mozilla doesn't include the kitchen-sink yet, but we are working on it!
See bug #122411 [about:kitchensink] on bugzilla.mozilla or go straight to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=764
Replacing IE6 for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had a number of attempts at replacing IE with Mozilla for my everyday browsing, but in the end the non-native feel of it on Windows always pushes me away.
On the other hand, the native feel of the browser shell, mixed with the Gecko rendering engine is a real winner.
Re:Replacing IE6 for me (Score:2)
it is quick, simple, featured and compatible with most pages, including this one [tittyscan.com] (provided the flash plug'in is here - don't mind the domain name, just the famous animation including music
Re:Replacing IE6 for me (Score:2)
Of course, you can load Mozilla skins that override these native widgets, if that's your preference.
Ummm...... No (Score:2)
THAT's [mozdev.org] Luna?! And "I'm Emmitt Smith".
Tried 0.4. Still not as native to my OS (XP, Luna) as IE. *sigh* Perhaps in v1.0.
Where's the source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cool, an anti-crap browser (Score:5, Insightful)
IE may be a generally smooth browser, but the fact is that when it's vulnerable to infinite troll popups [dms100.org], allows installs of Bonzi buddy and Gatorware, puts animated ads right over what your'e reading, and makes the internet a shame to browse, it's time to switch, and this looks like a great alternative for Windows users.
Re:Cool, an anti-crap browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Only until Mozilla based browsers reach a fairly significant level of marketshare, then the advertisers will adapt. Mozilla blocks popups that aren't associated with an onClick event? Make ads popup on every click of a link. And once advertisers figure out how to code to the real DOM, as opposed to the IE DOM, all those stupid DHTML flying adverts will work with Mozilla.
Sadly, it's only a matter of time until all this crap effects Mozilla (+variants) users, unless someone can come up with a solution.
nytimes (Score:3, Informative)
It's hard to show someone mozilla and say "look it blocks popups!", only to find out the person keeps nytimes.com as their home page.
I would like to see a model where popups disappear forever, meaning no download popups, no creation of windows under any circumstances- just a colored, backgrounded tab with an adjustible and optional flashing feature to indicate that there is new business that otherwise would have been a popup. Advertisters can't rewrite the browser if it doesn't even contain the code for popups, or rather if popups are reinterpreted as "create background tab".
Re:nytimes (Score:4, Informative)
You should try Phoenix. It doesn't use Mozilla's pop-up blocking code.
I just downloaded it, and tested NYT right off the bat, since it had been a nuisance to me, too. Phoenix successfully blocked the NYT popups.
Here's how Phoenix seems to work: It blocks all popups, even the ones you might want to see (e.g., those associated with onClick).
When a popup is blocked, a little (i) icon appears in the status bar. Click on it to see the originating hostname for the popup that was blocked. If it was a popup you wanted, you can unblock that site.
It works like a charm on NYT, and since it blocks all popups, it's hard to see how someone might code around this.
The only downside: If you use a lot of sites with "good" popups you want to see, you'll need to take the time (three mouseclicks for each) to unblock those sites.
That's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept (the much faster launch time of Phoenix -- without staying resident in memory -- is an added bonus).
Shhhhhhhhhh!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the best damn browser on the web. Don't make the advertizers wise to it, or they'll just bugger it up. Like everything *else* they touch.
GMFTatsujin
Theme support isn't exactly new (Score:5, Interesting)
--Asa
I Love It (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Love It (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I Love It (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I Love It (Score:3, Informative)
Cool. But you forgot something. Read the release notes [mozilla.org] for 0.4.
I'll quote it here:
Reason #1 for installing Mozilla and/or Phoenix (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reason #1 for installing Mozilla and/or Phoenix (Score:2)
NYAAAAAAAARGHHHHHH!!!!!
You killed 319 popups. Yay.
You're right, that's so creepingly realistic.
Getting it to work on Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)
As for memory footprint and speed: Yes, Phoenix *definitely* is a lot better, even compared to optimized builds (i.e. homecompiled with optimalisations, as Gentoo does)
Maybe some numbers will convince people? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Here's a more subjective comparison: (Score:4, Informative)
On the laptop,
Mozilla: Painfully slow
Phoenix: Usable
On the desktop:
Mozilla: The best browser I have ever used
Phoenix: Not sufficiently faster to make up for the fact that I can't search google straight out of the address bar.
Re:Here's a more subjective comparison: (Score:4, Informative)
But you can! [netscape.com] Quick Search bookmarks let you search any site you want from the address bar.
Re:Here's a more subjective comparison: (Score:3, Informative)
javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;if
[Slashdot adds a space or two to the above code.. strip those out when adding this to your bookmark list]
I just add it to my toolbar folder so it's right under the URL line. You can either click it and type your search in the popup, or highlight some text first, then click the bookmark, and it will submit that text to google...
[Footnote: on some complex pages it does not always seem to respond, but I've been too busy to test why]
Real sign of success is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Naw, FDISK + Format... (Score:2)
... is the unbeatable combination for dealing with WinXP :P
Re:Real sign of success is... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually at the moment, there is no truely real way to switch. This is because some programs (mainly Microsofts) insist on firing up IE for a URL even when some other application is registered as being the default browser.
It's in the MSKB as a bug, until thats fixed, I still have to deal with occasionally IE loading when I don't want it.
(Of course I'm ignoring the fact that the IE dlls are almost in constant use - before anyone points it out)
Mac Guyver (Score:3, Funny)
Cool ! Phoenix Foundation really rules.
Side joke :
Q:how many 't's are there in "MacGuyver" ?
A: 76 : "ta ta ta ta ta ta ta
tatata
tatata
tatatata ta ta ta
tatatata tatata tatata tatata tatata tata..."
Looks good to me... (Score:2)
It is quicker than Mozilla by far, and the rendering looks to be equally good as you would hope. I haven't used it for long, so I don't know about stability, but it can't be that much worse than Mozilla 1.1 which I have been using exclusively for the past month or so.
Now how do I enable anti-aliased text? And how do I import my Mozilla bookmarks...?
I will be keeping my eye on this one for sure.
Awesome Tab Improvement over Mozilla! (Score:4, Informative)
Now I'd just like the same behavior on form buttons...
My experience with Phoenix 0.4... (Score:4, Informative)
All times are the average of three or four tests, eyeballing the clock.
Startup Time
Netscape 4.79: 4s
Phoenix 0.4: 10s
Slashdot Homepage Load Time
Netscape 4.79: 1.5s
Phoenix 0.4: 2.5s
RAM Usage (with only Slashdot Homepage loaded)
Netscape 4.79: 8012k
Phoenix 0.4: 20,182k
Now, don't get me wrong, I think that the fact that the Phoenix people are trying to make a slim browser is great!
(BTW, this is the main reason I don't use Mozilla... it's a DOG on this machine. Even IE's kinda slow.)
Why I won't switch from Mozilla (yet) (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's hoping Mozilla is split up into separately installable components in the future. I have no desire to go back to any of the other email programs I've ever used (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora mostly).
Good job on Phoenix though, very cool!
Another open source fork? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, few will contribute to or implement Moz if it looks like (and appearances count) its own developers and users are abandoning it.
Second, does mozilla.org have so many resources that it can be safely split between two projects? Either we have sufficient resources or one gets shortchanged.
Finally, isn't a lack of long term commitment to a product exactly what corporate IT fears about open source? Shouldn't we take extra steps to avoid the appearance of that problem?
Per the FAQ, and in many other places, the Phoenix developers definitely seem to intend to separate themselves from Moz:
it's not Mozilla. It's backed by mozilla.org, sure, but with each milestone you'll see it further diverge from Mozilla.
Still doesn't *really* block images. (Score:3, Informative)
Need better home page - like most open source (Score:4, Insightful)
Too many open source projects assume that those who read their home pages already know what the project is for, or know why they would want to use it.
I would ask open source project folks to at least put a short description of their project (with minimal cryptic references to geek acronyms) and also a list of reasons as to why one might want it.
Computing today is too wide a field for all of use to keep track of every acronym and every open source project, so a web page that says "this is a better BLURP, using FARGLE and the new XVC standard" is pretty useless.
After all, what good is it to put a lot of work into a project if you keep away a lot of users by inadequate "marketing." If you want your work to be used and appreciated by lots of people, tell us what it is and why we want to use it!.
Is this the future of Mozilla? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that Phoenix is more than a good web browser though, I think it is nothing less than a complete vindication of the Mozilla project. Pheonix shows that all of the time put into Mozilla has not just produced bloat, it has also produced a code base that is useful enough to make something extremely efficent and effective, extremely quickly.
It is also very good to see something come out of Mozilla that isn't just an unbranded version of Netscape, and I would like to see more of this. Given the work that is going into producing the GRE (Gecko Runtime Environment) which aims to make a distribution of the bits of Mozilla that are used by everything, so that programs can be linked against it without needing the whole broweser suite to be installed, I think that Pheonix and other apps like it (a mail reader and all the rest) could be the future of Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 was both a Monolithic Communications Suite and an application framework, and Phoenix has shown the power of that frame work. I would like it if Mozilla 2.0 was just a framework, but it was released with a set of standalone programs that worked well together, but could be used equally well seperately, and I think it would do Mozilla's credibility a lot of good if it was something that definately isn't Netscape.
I wonder if anyone at Mozilla.org is thinking like this.
Re:my context. (Score:3, Interesting)
When you consider the marketing aspects, it is also a good idea to differentiate, since "divide and conquer" still works. By offering multiple products you have a good chance that the "dumb" users will chose one of yours. I don't know if this applies to the browser market, but in general it is a good thing to do.
Re:my context. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Look at them go! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [mozdev.org] for dozens of great XUL-based projects.
--Asa
Re:Themes support? (Score:5, Informative)
"themes" aren't included in Phoenix. Phoenix has one UI (which is defined in part in images and CSS). The nature of the UI makes it possible for other people to easily create new styles or themes (images and CSS). Phoenix contains a trivial amount of code to manage the install and uninstall of themes but the themes themselves are 3rd party components and are not "include in" Phoenix.
--Asa
Re:Reopen tabs onload (Score:3, Informative)
Phoenix should really ship with that extension, it's just great, you can do *EVERYTHING* with tabs with that extension.
Re:Reopen tabs onload (Score:2)
Re:Debian packages? (Score:2)
For my convenience [TM], I made a quick-n-dirty debian package with alien
(basically extracting the package in
[marc@scorpius delaunay]$ cat
deb http://lesbos.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~mleeman/debian unstable/
deb-src http://lesbos.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~mleeman/debian unstable/
Re:I used Phoenix until (Score:2)
This problem can usually be resolved by performing a clean install of Phoenix by deleting any previous profiles. See also Bugzilla Bug 174880. Additionally, in Bug 176549, Asa mentions it works in 1026 builds, so I take that as the bug might even be gone in 0.4 without erasing the profiles?
So I'd suggest you install Phoenix 0.4 on top of 0.3 to see if the bug is gone before doing anything drastic.
On the other hand... (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't start on Win95. (Score:3, Informative)
Its knows issue # 2