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Phoenix 0.2 Web Browser: Lean, Mean Mozilla
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Oct 07, 2002 03:54 PM
from the cuttin'-down-to-size dept.
from the cuttin'-down-to-size dept.
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit reviews the Phoenix 0.2 web browser: 'I've never been a huge fan of the Mozilla web browser. It's too big and too slow in my opinion. I like the Opera web browser a lot, but it is closed source, ad supported (for the free version) or costs money (if you want to get rid of the banner ads). Opera is almost exactly what I'm looking for in a web browser as far as features are concerned: fast, browser window tabs, mouse gesturing, and I can configure the interface a little. It has its problems, no doubt. Java and Javascript are big tripping points for it to name just a few. But speed is what I'm looking for.
Then along comes Mozilla's Phoenix web browser.
Phoenix still uses a lot of the Mozilla code. In fact, Phoenix code is based completely on Mozilla code, so the development should move rather quickly. Here is a link to a road map for what it's developers think is a close time-line for its development. Although still in heavy development, I have found Phoenix quite useable and stable even in the early 0.2 release and I continue to download the nightly release every day.'"
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Phoenix 0.2 Web Browser: Lean, Mean Mozilla
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Roadmap Link (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the link to the roadmap: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-ro admap.html [mozilla.org]
neurostarChimera (Score:5, Funny)
Chimera is here [mozilla.org]. It might be nice to see Chimera and Phoenix share ideas, programmers, resources, and code, but both projects seem to be doing OK so far as separate entities.
Besides, if they merged the projects, they'd have a very confusing animal for a logo: flaming bird with the head of a male lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake: a 'phimera'.
Since the new project would also be Mac OS X -native, they really should also crossbreed this new 'phimera' with Hexley [hexley.com] (the Darwin mascot), a duck-billed platypus with horns. The result would be a horny duck-faced lion with a goatee that lays flaming serpent eggs midair.
I think you can see now the grave importance of keeping these two projects separate.
-Mark
IE (Score:3, Troll)
Re:IE (Score:4, Insightful)
I know, I know, it starts fast because MS ties it so tightly to Windows, it doesn't really do CSS right, it is a security nightmare, etc, etc.. but the bottom line is, considered as a TOOL, IE 6 is the best there is. I rarely have fewer than 10 browser windows open or minimized, 99.99% of pages always render right (because designers have to test with it), and it is extremely stable -- crashes perhaps once-twice a month on average.
Even though it is still behind, I hope like anyone that Mozilla's rapid improvement continues (with projects like this) and it becomes a superior solution.
The thing that still scares me is 'why?' -- IE is solid enough that Mozilla needs to do something more than just reach parity to get any real foothold, at least on Windoze. Cm'mon, AOL, switch!
Re:IE (Score:5, Insightful)
The post contains several reasons why IE sucks "it doesn't really do CSS right, it is a security nightmare" but the conclusion is "Mozilla still doesn't come close to IE".
Goddamnit, use the "quickstart" option. Your only complaint is solved.
Mozilla has so many handy features like popup-blocking, tabs and so much more than IE that it beats IE hands down.
couldn't agree more (Score:5, Informative)
Add to that already-beautiful list of "mozilla is sweeter" features:
Portability - I can use the same browser on my linux box at home as I can in the windows labs at my university - which is great, IMO.
Mozilla Composer/Mail/Add-ons - free stuff that people forget are included with the full install - you shouldn't ignore those nice freebies.
There are several other "cool" things I like about Moz, like zoom ( ctrl + ), image blocking by server, etc. - but I don't know if IE implements these as well.
Moz isn't perfect, no. But it is my favorite. Phoenix is pretty sweet though - it may steal my browsing crown soon.
Re:IE (Score:5, Funny)
Whoops. I think you mean:
IF isMicrosoftSoftware THEN
dontSwapOut
END IF
Re:IE (Score:5, Informative)
SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST ON A MOTORCYCLE TALKING ON A MOBILE PHONE!@$ This thing is fast as hell.
I'm really glad it did not go the way of Mozilla interface, which looks like Netscape. Part of the Mozilla trouble is just that. People presume it's the "old" netscape and are reluctant to keep it on their systems.
Furthermore, I love it how Phoenix does not integrate into your OS like a multi-headed hydra. Tabbed browsing is a plus. Still achievable with netcaptor [netcaptor.com] on IE 5.x/6.x but not a native application.
This will be the browser I will use on Win2k when they figure out how to dock the google toolbar [google.com] on it.
Also, many windows users confuse the IE loadtime with page render time. It's a common misconseption. I am sold on Phoenix.
browser requirements (Score:4, Funny)
tabbed browsing
full DOM support
full javascript support
intelligent form autofill
intelligent address bar
full porn support
Re:browser requirements (Score:5, Informative)
Re:browser requirements (Score:4, Informative)
One of my favorite web browsing features comes from a project called Pornzilla [netscape.com], an effort to turn Moz into a better poon-viewing platform.
At the link above, there's a neat little javascript-bookmarklet which will open a new window and populated with all images linkd to on any given page. You can then save just the images en-masse or view them without clicking to and fro a bunch.
Yes, it's a neat invention for porn surfers. It's even better for any kind of web artwork or to check image links on a page you're developing. Unfortuneatly, it chokes on donkey balls on sites that check referrer headers before serving images.
Re:browser requirements (Score:4, Informative)
Not anymore -- bbaetz, darin, and I fixed bug 123293 in August. If you find any specific sites or command sequences (such as "linked images" followed by View Image followed by Shift+Reload) that fail to send the referrer header in 1.2alpha or later, please file a bug and cc me.
Weird Weird Weird (Score:4, Interesting)
I LOVE IT!
The best thing is that I can customize it so that in full screen mode, my most common bookmarks, an address bar, a google search bar, a go button, and navigation buttons are all in one thin line up at the top freeing all my screen space!
It's also the fastest browser I've ever used under either Linux or WinXP and (in the 10 seconds I've had to use it) seemingly solid.
There is only one thing missing that may force me back to mozilla: the inability to "block images from this server," i.e., to get rid of ads.
Re:Weird Weird Weird (Score:5, Informative)
That feature is targeted for the 0.3 release (October 8th) according to this [mozilla.org] (search on page for 'Image blocking').
Re:The Slashing Edge (Score:4, Funny)
just installed this ... (Score:3, Informative)
Nightly builds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm why download nightly builds of a usable, stable application?
If it's usable and stable, why not wait for the next point release?
Re:Nightly builds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the version number in this case is accurate: this is an 0.2 and will act like one from time to time. You can actually expect noticeable changes from day to day.
Beating on nightlys gives immediate feedback on the effects of changes made that day - catch serious bugs early. Being a tester is a way to contribute greatly to a project as Joe User. And if there's a bug that's really been annoying you, you can get the fix straight away instead of having to wait until the next full release.
I think Phoenix is doing it this way because that's how Mozilla does it - and it works very well for Mozilla - and therefore because they can (being in the Mozilla build system).
Re:Nightly builds? (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't say it is bug free, stable and usable are completely different.
Stable - Doesn't crash all of the time (pretty much an opinion)
Usable - Also opinion
Bug Free - See Fantasy
Phoenix is quite usable (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't they arleady do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why can't they arleady do this? (Score:4, Informative)
Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it uses RAM, but so does IE, and not in "IEXPLORE.EXE" either - most of that code is integrated right into the Windows Explorer code.
A lot of people who have claimed Mozilla is "too big and slow" have never used a 1.0+ build I would assume, or are trying to compare Moz for Linux (which is =much= slower than it's Windows counterpart), with Moz for Windows.
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Loading large tables and large quanity of images (thumbnails) are slower than IE. Download pre-buffering actually becomes a problem when you download large files, due to it downloading in your temp dir, then moving the file after its completed. Boris Zbarsky said a fix might land in around 1.3'ish http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12992
There are a few other slow downs in mozilla, but most are thread releated. 1 active tab can freeze mozilla, etc.. (I would like to see downloads spawn into a seperate process...)
That being said, the Mozilla developers are top notch in fixing bugs and user interaction. They have always been kind in replying and educating the users.
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Informative)
In the most recent versions of both browsers I just opened the most recent MySQL manual - over 2MB of HTML in one file. My machine's a Duron 750 with 512MB, running Win2k. I timed rendering speed only - the file is served locally, and the browsers already started - I navigated to the file from a link on an otherwise blank (local) page. I timed from when I clicked the link:
- IE: 1.5 seconds
- Mozilla: 8 seconds
In short, Mozilla has a long way to go before it renders pages faster than IE.(This is a repost of an earlier comment [slashdot.org] of mine).
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically, I am sure browsers render different pages at different speeds due to the way their rendering engines work. It is kind of like the old color inkjet printers. Some of them could due full color pictures very well on the right paper, but when it came to black text they really sucked.
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Informative)
For general web browsing on my cable connection Moz is always just as faster and sometimes faster than IE.
Lets take a real world example shall we.
I just loaded foxnews.com on IE it took about 6.25 seconds to load. On Moz it took about 4.5. Oh, IE will do its best by throwing whatever meager bits of code it get up first, but the entire page loads faster in Mozilla.
www.time.com Mozilla 4 seconds, IE 5 seconds.
www.merck.com Mozilla 4.5, IE 4.75
The point is your example is a red herring.
"the difference in rendering speed alone is incredible - IE kicks Moz's ass."
Apparantly not.
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is that?
Re:Faster? On what OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone keep knocking XUL. Everything I have seen about it tells me _this_ is the way I want to be developing web apps. No more screwing around with DHTML menus, and Javascript trees that don't expand/collapse properly. Yes, its not cross-browser, but it is completely cross-platform.
And its really capable of being more than just a web application framework, but a real distributed app framework. This thing is the answer to the client side of
Fire up Mozilla or Phoenix and spend some time at http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/ or browse the list at http://www.mozdev.org/projects.html
Also, O'Reilly has already devoted a whole section to Mozilla XUL/XPCOM development (http://www.oreillynet.com/mozilla/).
XUL/XPCOM has bindings for Perl and Python, by the way. This is one bandwagon I don't mind jumping on, personally. Much more fun than
Mozilla, in the form of an ActiveX control (Score:5, Informative)
Create an ActiveX gecko to use instead of MSHTML.DLL
As you said, the IE engine is an ActiveX control. Here's a Gecko ActiveX control [www.iol.ie], and it even comes with a program that patches programs that embed IE so that they embed Gecko instead.
But ActiveX will get you nowhere on the other (non-Windows) platforms tnat Moz supports. Therefore, an ActiveX based Gecko browser for Windows should really be a separate project.
Unfortunately... (Score:4, Funny)
Yuck. (Score:3, Funny)
Why in the name of God's green earth can't we get a decent browser built?!
We can write software to manage checkbooks, to run space shuttles, to even serve more porn than the world ever needs.
But we can't get a decent browser out the door.
Why? Why is this?
ARGH!
Every one has its problems:
Netscape (1.x through 4.x) - Buggy, never rendered quite right
IE - Sucktitude. Security holes you can drive a truck through.
Mozilla - Bloated mess. Too many damned options & features. Typical open source project -- so many features, it doesn't work right for anyone.
OmniWeb - has potential, compatible with 3 websites.
Opera - small, lean, advertises all over the damned place. Compatible with a few more web pages than OmniWeb.
Why can't we get this right??
Sorry for the rant, it's just frustrating! I don't care much about the speed (isn't that why we have supersonic processors? So we can write sh_ty code and not worry?) but it needs to WORK. Reliably. Every time.
As it is, I have *3* browsers I use regularly. OmniWeb, IE and Mozilla. Some things render correctly in each
ARGH! And now we're going to build another half-step child of Mozilla? Like the world needs _THAT_?
--NBVB
Re:Yuck. (Score:5, Informative)
But we can't get a decent browser out the door.
Why? Why is this?
Because a browser that does what you want it to do is significantly more complex than any of the three examples you gave.
Re:Yuck. (Score:5, Funny)
Significantly more complex? It's a fucking COMPILER. It shouldn't DO anything other than make source code into binaries. That's it. No garbage collection. No pretty GUI tools. Compile programs. And compile ALL of them that are even close. I don't want to know if the program's source code isn't perfect. I don't want to know if it isn't up to the "ANSI standard". I don't give a shit. Just let me run the program, and let it run quickly and correctly. I don't know about you, but the current version of Visual Basic does this flawlessly for me, and is fast as hell. I'm happy.
Project Page (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand... (Score:5, Funny)
And I download the daily release every night.
-
But why not just use Dillo (Score:5, Interesting)
It's small, (300K), fast, and free. What else could you possibly want?
Standards compliance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you'll also need an entire quirks engine that mimics IE 5. Good luck!
the myth of the lightweight browser (Score:5, Insightful)
You can even see this in the posts that are showing up here already. People are saying, "wow, this looks great, as soon as it has x I'll switch over from Mozilla," "all it needs is y and IE is history," and "this is z away from beating Opera." But, of course, x != y != z, and the end result is a browser that is unusable for just about everyone.
What these teams don't realize is that the web is used for so many different things today that designing a small, general-purpose web browser is all but impossible. A web browser, if it is complete, is by definition a large, complex system. Microsoft and Mozilla have accepted this. It's time for the rest of us to do so as well.
Re:the myth of the lightweight browser (Score:5, Informative)
A small snippet from the FAQ: Phoenix FAQ [mozilla.org]
Dude, that's bad time management (Score:3, Flamebait)
You'd probably end up with a good thirty seconds more at the end of your day to kick back and enjoy.
Tabs vs. MDI (Score:3, Informative)
I really prefer Opera's MDI windows. Because I am able to view more than one windows at a time but still can hide/restore all the windows with a single click. I just like it to move my "surfing workspace" around quite fast (i.e. with ONE click) but still have the advantages of "normal" windows.
Not faster... (Score:4, Informative)
I downloaded it to test on my amd 333 64mb laptop, but it is still too slow for me to use.
However, it's a little more usable in this laptop than mozilla itself.
I want a fast, small browser with tabs, java, javascript, flash and saving passwords. There isn't any right now, being Opera the closest one. Problems: adware, no password saving.
My review (Score:4, Informative)
Gone but planned:
Still there:
Most of the stuff that is gone but planned just has a broken UI. You can set the prefs if you want to edit your javascript config files or copy the config files from your mozilla directory. Exceptions are the sidebar and the site navigation bar which need to be written. This information comes from my 5 minute review [slashdot.org] of the browser that I posted last time and the followup comments to it. (My apologies to Asa for getting a few of the details wrong in my first review)
don't install everything (Score:4, Interesting)
If its a really really fast browser you want... (Score:3, Funny)
Just downloaded it (Score:4, Interesting)
Pheonix is the only browser that has come close to tempting me away from IE!
All i can say is, its fantastic. Small, lightweight. Has jsut the features i use, and is clean as well.
It even makes fonts look good etc. I think ill be sticking for the time being, and i will certainly be following the development closely from now on!
Re:Just downloaded it (Score:4, Informative)
IE is a good browser, but as a web developer for web development, shame on you for not using Mozilla. :)
Jason.
If you want speed.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I could imagine you need browser to find information about something - text based browsers are more than sufficient for that task. Besides it's a pleasure to read clear console text (with custom font set, of course
Of course it's nice to look at pictures of pretty girls once in a while - I do that too, but for that purpose mozilla / konqueror is more than good enough. The point is - ascii text browsers are the best if you are surfing to get some pure information about something.
MozUpdate (shameless self-promotion) (Score:4, Informative)
nice clean browser (Score:3, Insightful)
Good one Calvin (Score:3, Funny)
Bwahahahaha ! Now that put a smile on my face.
(title borrowed from one of my favorite lines from a PJ's episode)
Please change the UI (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree with a previous poster in that the "light browser" is really a myth and Phoenix will eventually get bloated and there is nothing wrong with that, I also think that the real advantage of Phoenix is that they can improve the old and not so intuitive User Interface that Mozilla inherited from Netscape.
Mozilla, and for that matter Netscape >= 6, was designed as we know from the ground up with a greatly improved, new codebase. But they kept the same UI to make sure the old users wouldn't freak out. I won't argue whether that was a good decision. But I think that Phoenix has nothing to inherit and should go ahead and put all the effort on an improved UI. That by itself will make the effort worthwhile.
My 1.99 cts
Evidence Microsoft isn't involved in this project (Score:4, Funny)
Do everything possible to minimize the build size.
Targeted for Phoenix 0.3 according to Bugzilla.
Anti-aliased fonts? Heres how... (Score:5, Informative)
Edit the file defaults/pref/unix.js at about line 230.
Change
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", false);
to
pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
And there you go!.
You probably should also tinker with font.antialias.min,
font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.min and font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain until the fonts look good to you.
Browser times (Score:3, Interesting)
* Mozilla - I never use. Way too slow. Takes around 30 secs to open up a browser window first time. Still slow after that on my machine
* K-Meleon - used to use this instead of IE when (a) I wanted something fast and (b) on sites that crash IE (quite a few on my machine). It loads first time in the same time as a preloaded IE. Lightening fast
* Phoenix - definately replacement for above. Loads around 10secs first time but after that it's instantaneous (as opposed to IE still taking around 4 secs each new window).
I'll be gradually moving all my bookmarks from IE to Phoenix and using that for all my browsing, keeping IE for testing the sites I work on and the occasional site that Phoenix doesn't render (if I ever find one). I am *very* impressed with Phoenix.
Phillip.
I like it too, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, let me say how I tested it. I am running Gentoo linux on a PIII-500, which is lucky enough to have someone who distributed the source to it for us. So I compiled it and started trying to use it.
My previous browser was (and now is again) Galeon.
Everything worked pretty well: I downloaded mouse gestures (and then changed permissions so that they would work without being root), and advanced tabbed browsing, and was generally impressed.
But then I checked on the speed thing that everyone touts by
1) Opening a bunch of tabs and switching between them.
2) Going back and forward rapidly in the browser history
3) Running some javascript animations
Then I ran gnome-system-monitor (which can detect threads, unlike top), and checked on the memory requirements.
Know what I found with all of this? Its seems to run the same speed as galeon. It takes about 25MB on my system, and runs about the same speed.
Now, both of these two do run faster and with smaller memory requirements than Mozilla, but...we should probably compare it to all Mozilla variations to see if its doing something unique in the open source world.
The reason I switched back to galeon is because Galeon has all of the features that Phoenix does, PLUS it has smart bookmarks (so that you can search google, freshmeat, dogpile, slackware, etc).